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BOHEMIA IN LONDON 




A SOHO RESTAURANT 






Bohemia in London 



BY 



ARTHUR RANSOME 

AUTHOR OF "THB SOULS OF THK STREETS 
" THB STONE LADY," ETC. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
FRED TAYLOR 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1907 



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UtfRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Gobies Reeelvetf 
OCT 26 *90r 
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CLASS4 XXC, N6. 
COPY tt. 



Copyright, 1907, by 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

Published October, igoy 



TO 

M. P. SHIEL 



NOTE 

This book would never have been 
begun if it had not been for the 
friendly suggestion of Miss Ocean 
Lee. It would never have been 
finished but for the strenuous scold- 
ing and encouragement of Mr, 
Hughes Massie. It would be worse 
than it is if my friends, especially 
Mr. Edward Thomas, had been less 
generous of their advice, 

Carlyle Studios, 

July, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

PAGE 

Planning books and writing them — The material of the 
book — Paris and London — ^The method of the 
book — The word " Bohemia " — Villon — Grub 
Street — Hazlitt and Reynolds — Petrus Borel, 
Gautier, Murger — Modern Bohemia — Geography 3 

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 

Walking home in the morning — ^^Coffee-stalls — Haz- 
litt, De Quincey, Goldsmith — The grocer's van — 
The journey — " Love for Love " at the World's 
End — ^The first lodging — Furniture — The first 
night in Bohemia 15 

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 

Don Saltero's— Smollett— Franklin— The P.B.— Car- 
lyle and Hunt — Carlyle's house — Chelsea and the 
river — Rossetti in Cheyne Walk — Whistler's 
dinner-party — and Steele's — ^Turner's house — ^The 
Embankment 33 

A CHELSEA EVENING 

An actor — " Gypsy " — A room out of a fairy tale — 
guests — " Opal hush " — Singing and Stories — 
Going home 51 



CONTENTS 

IN THE STUDIOS 



PAGE 



The Studio — Posing the model — Talking and painting 
— The studio lunch — The interrupter — ^Artists* 
models — The Chelsea Art Club — The Langham 
Sketch Club — Sets in the Studios — Hospitality . 69 

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 

London full of countrymen — Hazlitt in the Southamp- 
ton — Burrow and the publisher — Bampfylde's life 
— The consolation of the country — Country songs 
from an artist's model — ^A village reputation . 87 

OLD AND NEW SOHO 

Pierce Egan — " Life In London " — De Quincey In 
Greek Street — Thackeray — Sandwiches and ba- 
nanas — Barrel-organs — ^The Soho restaurants — 
Beguinot's — ^The Dieppe — B rice's — The waiters 10 1 

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 

Casanova at the Orange — ^The Moorish — ^The Alge- 
rian — the Petit Riche — The Bohemian In the 
Provence — Newspaper proprietors In the Europe 121 

THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 
The Charing Cross Road — Book-buying — " The 
Anatomy of Melancholy " — The ordinary shop — 
Richard Savage pawning books — Selling review 
copies — Gay and the bookshops — Lamb and 
** street readers " — Market-stalls — ^True Book- 
men — Old ladies — ^Tom Folio — ^A prayer to my 
publishers . ., 137 



CONTENTS 

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 

PAGE 

Johnson and Boswell — Goldsmith and Doctor Kenrlck 
— Hazlitt and Charles Lamb — De Quincey and 
Coleridge at the Courier office — The " Tom and 
Jerry " times — Dickens — Elizabethan Fleet Street 
— Fleet Street on a sunny morning — ^The pedes- 
trians — Mitre Court — Salisbury Court — The 
Cock — The Cheshire Cheese — ^The Rhymers' 
Club— The Press Club— Cafes in Fleet Street— A 
Fleet Street Talking Club 153 

SOME NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 

An organ of enlightened criticism — ^An editor — 
Methods of work — The gay way with reviewing 
— Log-rolling — Our circulation — Another editor 
— ^Two more — The Bohemian magazines — Finan- 
ciers and poets 175 

WAYS AND MEANS 

Literary Ghosting — " An author to be let " — ^Borrow- 
ing Chatterton — Waiting for your money — Pen- 
ury and art — Extravagance the compensation for 
poverty — Scroggen — ^A justifiable debauch . . 193 

TALKING, DRINKING AND SMOKING 

The true way for enjoyment — " Tavern crawls " — 
The right reader — Doctor Johnson — Ben Jonson 
— Beaumont — Gay — Herrick — " The Ballad of 
Nappy Ale " — Keats — William Davies — The 
Rules of the old talking clubs — To the reader . 209 



CONTENTS 

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 



A NOVELIST 



A PAINTER 



A GIPSY POET 



PAGE 



Steele — The Kft-Cats — Dickens and red-hot chops — 
Lamb — Leigh Hunt's cottage — " Sleep and Poe- 
try " — Hazlitt on Leigh Hunt — Leigh Hunt's 
friends — Modern Hampstead— The salons — ^The 
conversation — The Hempstead poets .... 229 

A WEDDING AN BOHEMIA 

Bride and bridegroom — The procession — Madame of 

the restaurant — Creme de Menthe — The morning 241 



255 



267 



275 



CONCLUSION 

Crabbe in 1781 and in 1817 — Bohemia only a stage in 
a man's life — ^The escape from convention — Prac- 
tical matters — Hazlitt and John Lamb — ^The 
farevi^ell to Bohemia — Marriage — Success — Quod 
erat demonstrandum 283 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



I 



A SoHo Restaurant 
The Coffee Stall . 
RossETTi's House in Cheyne Walk 

Work 

The Artist's Model 

In the Moorish Cafe . 

" Comfort and Secluded Luxury 

The Wild Bohemian 

A Bookshop .... 

The Bookstalls of the Charing 

Cross Road 
Doctor Johnson's House in Gough 

Square .... 
Fleet Street .... 
The Old Cheshire Cheese 
The Editor .... 
The Novelist 
The River from Battersea Bridge 



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" 278 



Ce livre est toute ma jeunesse; 
Je Vai fait sans presque y songer. 
II y paraity je le confesse, 
Et faurais pu le corriger, 

Mais quand Vhomme change sans cesse, 
Au passe pourquoi rien changer? 
Va-t'en, pauvre oiseau passager; 
Que Dieu te mene a ton adresse! " 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 




INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

WHEN authors are honest to them- 
selves, they admit that their books 
are failures, in that they are never 
quite what they wished to make 
them. A book has a wilful way of its own, as 
soon as it is fairly started, and somehow has a 
knack of cheating its writer out of itself and 
changing into something different. It is usually 
a reversal of the story of " Beauty and the Beast." 
The odious beast does not become a prince; but 
a wonderful, clear, brilliant-coloured dream (as 
all books are before they are written) turns in 
the very hands of its author into a monster that 
he does not recognise. 

I wanted to write a book that would make real 
on paper the strange, tense, joyful and despair- 
ing, hopeful and sordid life that is lived in Lon- 
don by young artists and writers. I wanted to 
present life in London as it touches the people 
who come here, like Whittingtons, to seek the 
gold of fame on London pavements. They are 
conscious of the larger life of the town, of the 
struggling millions earning their weekly wages, 
of the thousands of the abyss who earn no wages 
and drift from shelter to shelter till they die; 



4 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

they know that there is a mysterious East End, 
full of crowded, ill-conditioned life; they know 
that there is a West End, of fine houses and a 
more elaborate existence; they have a confused 
knowledge of the whole, but only a part be- 
comes alive and real, as far as they themselves 
are concerned. That part is the material of 
which I hoped to make this book. 

There are a dozen flippant, merry treatises 
on Bohemia in London, that talk of the Savage 
Club, and the Vagabond dinners, and all the 
other consciously unconventional things that 
like to consider themselves Bohemian. But 
these are not the real things; no young poet or 
artist fresh to London, with all his hopes unreal- 
ised, all his capacity for original living unspent, 
has anything to do with them. They bear no 
more vital relation to the Bohemian life that is 
actually lived than masquerades or fancy dress 
balls bear to more ordinary existence. Mem- 
bers of the Savage Club, guests of the Vaga- 
bonds have either grown out of the life that 
should be in my book, or else have never lived 
in it. They are respectable citizens, dine com- 
fortably, sleep in feather-beds, and find hot 
water waiting for them in the mornings. It 
is, perhaps, the unreality of their pretences that 
makes honest outsiders who are disgusted at the 
imitation, or able to compare them with the 
inhabitants of the Quartier or Montmartre, say 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 5 

that there is no such thing as Bohemia in 
London. 

But there is; and anyone who considers the 
number of adventurous young people fresh 
from conventional homes, and consequently 
ready to live in any way other than that to which 
they have been accustomed, who come to town 
with heads more full of poetry than sense, must 
realise how impossible it is that there should 
not be. Indeed, it is likely that our Bohemia, 
certainly in these days, is more real than that 
of Paris, for the Quartier is so well advertised 
that it has become fashionable, and Americans 
who can afford it go there, and almost out- 
number the others who cannot afford anything 
else. Of course, in London too, there are people 
who are Bohemians for fun; but not so many, 
because the fun in London is not an organised 
merriment that anyone may enjoy who can pay 
for it. Visitors to London do not find, as they 
do in Paris, men waiting about the principal 
streets, offering themselves as guides to Bohe- 
mia. The fun is in the life itself, and not to be 
had less cheaply than by living it. 

I wanted to get into my book, for example, 
the precarious, haphazard existence of the men 
who dine in Soho not because it is an uncon- 
ventional thing to do, but because they cannot 
usually afford to dine at all, and get better and 
merrier dinners for their money there than else- 



6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

where, the men who, when less opulent, eat 
mussels from a street stall without unseemly 
amusement at the joke of doing so, but as sol- 
emnly as you and I eat through our respectable 
meals, solacing themselves meanwhile with the 
thought of high ideals that you and I, being 
better fed, find less real, less insistent. 

It was a difficult thing to attempt; if I had 
simply written from the outside, and announced 
that oddly dressed artists ate bananas in the 
streets, that is all that could be said; there is 
an end of it, the meaning, the essence of the 
thing is lost, and it becomes nothing but a dull 
observation of a phenomenon of London life. 
There was nothing for it but to confess, to write 
in the first person of my own uncomfortable 
happy years, and to trust that the hall mark of 
actual experience would give blood and life, at 
least to some parts of the picture. Now that 
would have been very pleasant for me, in spite 
of the risk that a succession of pictures con- 
nected by an ego, should seem a conceited ego 
exhibiting itself by means of a succession of 
pictures. But there was another bother; for the 
life would not have been expressed if there were 
no suggestion of the older time, the memories 
of famous artists and writers that contribute to 
make the poetry of the present. Now it was 
impossibly ludicrous to be continually flying 
off from the detailed experience of an insignifi- 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 7 

cant person like myself, to dismiss in a cursory 
sentence men like Johnson, Hazlitt, or Sir Rich- 
ard Steele. Separate chapters had to be written 
on historical Bohemia, giving in as short a space 
as possible something of the atmosphere of remi- 
niscence belonging to particular localities. 
There are consequently two separate threads 
intertwisted through the book, general, histor- 
ical, and descriptive chapters, as impersonal as 
an egotist could make them, chapters on Chel- 
sea, Fleet Street, Soho, and Hampstead, and any 
number of single incidents and talks about dif- 
ferent aspects of Bohemian life — in short, all 
the hotch-potch that would be likely to come 
out if a Bohemian were doing his best to let 
someone else understand his manner of living. 
A chapter on the old bookstalls will jostle with 
an account of the Soho coffee-houses. One 
chapter will be a straightforward narrative of 
an adventure, another a discussion of the amaz- 
ing contrast between the country and the town, 
the life of the Bohemians and the places from 
which they come. The whole, I had hoped, 
would give something like an impression of the 
untidy life itself. 

Bohemia is an abominable word, with an air 
of tinsel and sham, and of suburban daughters 
who criticise musical comedies seriously, and 
remind you twice in an afternoon that they are 



8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

quite unconventional. But the best dictionaries 
define it as: " (i) A certain small country; (2) 
The gypsy life; (3) Any disreputable life; 
(4) The life of writers and painters " — in an 
order of descent that is really quite pleasant. 
And on consulting a classic work to find syn- 
onyms for a Bohemian, I find the following: 
" Peregrinator, wanderer, rover, straggler, 
rambler, bird of passage, gadabout, vagrant, 
scatterling, landloper, waif and stray, wastrel, 
loafer, tramp, vagabond, nomad, gypsy, emi- 
grant, and peripatetic somnambulist." If we 
think of the word in the atmosphere of all those 
others, it is not so abominable after all, and I 
cannot find a better. 

I suppose Villon is the first remembered 
Bohemian poet. He had an uncomfortable life 
and an untidy death. Hunted from tavern to 
tavern, from place to place, stealing a goose 
there, killing a man here in a drunken brawl, 
and swinging from a gibbet in the end, he is a 
worthy example for the consideration of all 
young people who wish to follow literature or 
art without any money in their pockets. But 
even his fate would not deter them. Indeed, 
when I was setting out, I even wished to emu- 
late him, and was so foolish as to write to an 
older friend that I wanted to be such another 
vagabond as Villon, and work and live in my 
own free way. The conceit of it, the idiocy — 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 9 

and yet, it is something to remember that you 
have once felt like that. My friend wrote back 
to me that of all kinds of bondage, vagabond- 
age v^as the most cruel and the hardest from 
v^hich to escape. I believe him now, but then 
I adventured all the same. 

Looking from Villon down the centuries, 
Grub Street seems to be the next important 
historical fact, a street of mean lodgings where 
poor hacks wrote rubbish for a pittance, or 
starved — not a merry place. 

And then to the happy time in England, when 
the greatest English critic, William Hazlitt, 
could write his best on a dead player of hand 
fives; when Reynolds, the friend of Keats, could 
write a sonnet on appearing before his lady 
with a black eye, " after a casual turn up," and 
speak of " the great men of this age in poetry, 
philosophy, or pugilism!'^ 

Then we think of the Romantics in France. 
There was the sturdy poet, Petrus Borel, set- 
ting up his " Tartars' Camp " in a house in 
Paris, with its one defiant rule pasted on the 
door: " All clothing is prohibited." There was 
Balzac, writing for a fortnight on end without 
leaving his garret. There was Theophile Gau- 
tier, wishing he had been born in the pomp of 
ancient days, contenting his Grecian instincts by 
writing Mademoiselle de Maupin in six weeks 
in a big, bare room, with foils and boxing gloves 



lo BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

lying always ready for the other Romantics who 
shared the place with him, and played the 
Porthos and the Aramis with a noble scorn for 
the nineteenth century. There was the whole 
jolly crowd that clapped Hernani into fame, 
and lasted bravely on through Murger's day — 
Murger, with his Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, 
and his melancholy verdict, " Bohemia is the 
preface to the Academy, the Hospital, or the 
Morgue." 

And now, to-day, in this London Bohemia 
of ours, whose existence is denied by the 
ignorant, all these different atmospheres arc 
blended into as many colours as the iridescence 
of a street gutter. Our Villous do not perhaps 
kill people, but they are not without their 
tavern brawls. They still live and write poetry 
in the slums. One of the best books of verse 
published in recent years was dated from a doss- 
house in the Marshalsea. Our Petrus Borels, 
our Gautiers, sighing still for more free and 
spacious times, come fresh from Oxford or 
Cambridge, write funny sonnets lamenting the 
age of Casanova, and, in a pleasant, harmless 
way, do their best to imitate him. Our Rey- 
noldses are mad over football, and compose 
verse and prose upon the cricket field. Our 
Romantics strut the streets in crimson sashes, 
carry daggers for their own delight, and fence 
and box and compose extravagant happy tales. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER ii 

Grub Street has broken up into a thousand gar- 
rets, but the hacks are still the same. And, as 
for Murger's young men, as for Collin, as for 
Schaunard with his hundred ways of obtaining 
a five-franc piece, why, I knew one who lived 
well for a year on three and sixpence of his own 
money and a handsome borrowing face. 

"Where are they all?" you ask. "Where 
is the Quartier?" It is difficult to give an 
answer without telling lies. For London is 
more unwieldy than Paris. It is impossible 
to draw a map, and say, pointing with a finger, 
" Here are artists, here romantic poets, here 
playwrights, here writers of polemic prose." 
They are scattered over a dozen districts, and 
mingled all together. There are only a few 
obvious grouping points. The newspapers, of 
course, are in Fleet Street, and the writers find 
that much of their life goes here, in the taverns 
and coffee-houses round about. The British 
Museum is in Bloomsbury, and students take 
lodgings in the old squares and in the narrow 
streets that run up to the Gray's Inn Road. 
The Charing Cross Road is full of bookshops 
where all, when they can afford it, buy. Soho is 
full of restaurants where all, when they can 
afford it, dine. And Chelsea, dotted with 
groups of studios, full of small streets, and cheap 
lodgings, is alive with artists and writers, and 
rich with memories of both. 




AN 

ARRIVAL 
IN 
BOHEMIA 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 

1HAD hesitated before coming fairly into 
Bohemia, and lived for some time in the 
house of relations a little way out of 
London, spending all my days in town, 
often, after a talking party in a Bloomsbury flat 
or a Fleet Street tavern, missing the last train 
out at night and being compelled to walk home 
in the early morning. Would I were as ready 
for such walks now. Why then, for the sake of 
one more half hour of laugh and talk and song, 
the miles of lonely trudge seemed nothing, and 
all the roads were lit with lamps of poetry and 
laughter. Down Whitehall I would walk to 
Westminster, where I would sometimes turn 
into a little side street in the island of quiet that 
lies behind the Abbey, and glance at the win- 
dows of a house where a poet lived whose works 
were often in my pocket, to see if the great man 
were yet abed, and, if the light still glowed be- 
hind the blind, to wait a little in the roadway, 
and dream of the rich talk that might be pass- 
ing, or picture him at work, or reading, or per- 
haps turning over the old prints I knew he 
loved. 

IS 



i6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Then on, along the Embankment, past the 
grey mass of the Tate Gallery, past the bridges, 
looking out over the broad river, now silver 
speckled in the moonlight, now dark, with 
bright shafts of light across the water and sparks 
of red and green from the lanterns on the boats. 
When a tug, with a train of barges, swept from 
under a bridge and brought me the invariable, 
unaccountable shiver with the cold noise of the 
waters parted by her bows, I would lean on the 
parapet and watch, and catch a sight of a dark 
figure silent upon her, and wonder what it 
would be like to spend all my days eternally 
passing up and down the river, seeing ships and 
men, and knowing no hours but the tides, until 
her lights would vanish round a bend, and leave 
the river as before, moving on past the still 
lamps on either side. 

I would walk on past Chelsea Bridge, under 
the trees of Cheyne Walk, thinking, with heart 
uplifted by the unusual wine, and my own 
youth, of the great men who had lived there, 
and wondering if Don Saltero's still knew the 
ghosts of Addison and Steele — and then I would 
laugh at myself, and sing a snatch of a song that 
the evening had brought me, or perhaps be led 
suddenly to simple matters by the sight of the 
bright glow of light about the coffee-stall, for 
whose sake I came this way, instead of crossing 
the river by Westminster or Vauxhall Bridge. 




THE COFFEE STALL 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 17 

There is something gypsyish about coffee- 
stalls, something very delightful. Since those 
days I have known many: there is one by Ken- 
sington Church, where I have often bought a 
cup of coffee in the morning hours, to drink on 
the paupers' bench along the railings; there is 
another by Notting Hill Gate, and another in 
Sloane Square, where we used to take late sup- 
pers after plays at the Court Theatre; but there 
is none I have loved so well as this small untidy 
box on the Embankment. That was a joyous 
night when for the first time the keeper of the 
stall recognised my face and honoured me with 
talk as a regular customer. More famous men 
have seldom made me prouder. It meant some- 
thing, this vanity of being able to add " Evening, 
Bill! " to my order for coffee and cake. Coffee 
and cake cost a penny each and are very good. 
The coffee is not too hot to drink, and the cake 
would satisfy an ogre. I used to spend a happy 
twenty minutes among the loafers by the stall. 
There were several soldiers sometimes, and one 
or two untidy women, and almost every night 
a very small, very old man with a broad shoulder 
to him, and a kindly eye. The younger men 
chaffed him, and the women would laughingly 
offer to kiss him, but the older men, who knew 
his history, were gentler, and often paid for his 
cake and coffee, or gave him the luxury of a 
hard-boiled egg. He had once owned half the 



1 8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

boats on the reach, and been a boxer in his day. 
I believe now that he is dead. There were 
others, too, and one, with long black hair and 
very large eyes set wide apart, attracted me 
strangely, as he stood there, laughing and talk- 
ing scornfully and freely with the rest. One 
evening he walked over the bridge after leaving 
the stall, and I, eager to know him, left my 
coffee untasted, and caught him up, and said 
something or other, to which he replied. He 
adjusted his strides to mine, and walked on with 
me towards Clapham. Presently I told him my 
name and asked for his. He stopped under a 
lamppost and looked at me. *' I am an artist," 
said he, " who does not paint, and a famous man 
without a name." Then, angry perhaps at my 
puzzled young face, he swung off without say- 
ing good-night into one of the side streets. I 
have often wondered who and what he was, 
and have laughed a little sadly to think how 
characteristic he was of the life I was to learn. 
How many artists there are who do not paint; 
how many a man without a name, famous and 
great within his own four walls! He avoided 
me after that, and I was too shy ever to question 
him again. 

Often the dawn was in the sky before I left 
the coffee-stall and crossed the river, and then 
the grey, pale mist with the faint lights in it, 
and the mysterious ghosts of chimneys and 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 19 

bridges, looming far away, seemed the most 
beautiful thing in life, one of those promises 
that are fairer than reality. It was easy to be 
a poet, gazing into that dream that hung over 
the river; easy to be a painter, with that delicate 
picture in my eyes. Sometimes, in the middle 
of the bridge I choked in my throat, and 
walked on as fast as I could, with my eyes 
straight before me, that I might leave it, before 
spoiling that beautiful vision by another even in 
a little less perfect. 

The rest of the journey lay between red brick 
houses, duteously asleep ; ugly flats, ugly villas, 
as like to each other as the sheets from a print- 
ing press, lined the roads, until my eyes were 
rested from their ugliness by a mile and a half 
of green and sparsely wooded common land, 
sometimes young and almost charming on a 
dewy morning, sometimes old, ragged, and 
miserable in rain. Then I had to turn once 
more into the wilderness of brick, through 
which I passed to the ugliest and most abomina- 
ble of London's unpleasing suburbs. 

I do not know quite what it is that leads 
artists and writers and others whose lives are 
not cut to the regular pattern, to leave their 
homes, or the existences arranged for them by 
their relations, for a life that is seldom as com- 
fortable, scarcely ever as healthful, and nearly 
always more precarious. It is difficult not to 



20 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

believe that the varying reasons are one in 
essence as they are one in effect, but I cannot 
find fewer than three examples, if all cases are 
to be illustrated. 

There is young Mr. William Hazlitt, after 
being allov^ed to spend eight years doing little 
but v^alking and thinking, suddenly returns to 
his childhood's plan of becoming an artist, 
v^orks like mad, gets a commission to copy 
Titians in the Louvre, lives hugger-mugger for 
four months in Paris, and returns to spend three 
years tramping the North of England as an 
itinerant portrait painter. De Quincey, on the 
other hand, v^alks out from his school gates, 
w^ith twelve guineas (ten borrowed) in his 
pockets, to his adventurous vagabondage on the 
Welsh hills, for no more urgent reason than that 
his guardians' ideas do not jump with his in the 
matter of sending him instantly to college. 
These are the men marked out early for art or 
literature. The one sets out because his old ones 
are not in sufficient subservience to him, the 
other because they think him a genius and allow 
him to do what he wants. In both of these cases 
the essential reason seems to be that when either 
wants anything he wants it pretty badly. But 
besides these there are the men who, like 
Goldsmith, take up an art by accident or 
necessity in later years, and more often than 
not are sent into the world because they are 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 21 

failures at home, and given their fifty guineas 
to clear out by an Uncle Contarine who wishes 
to relieve his brother's or sister's anxieties rather 
than those of his nephew. 

Things were so a hundred years ago, and they 
arc still the same. I was very young, and mad 
to be a Villon, hungry to have a life of my own. 




My wishes told my conscience twenty times a 
day that my work (my work!) could but ill 
progress in a house where several bustling lives 
were vividly lived in directions opposite to my 
own desires. I think my relations must have 
been quite as anxious to get rid of me. At last 
I spent a morning prowling round Chelsea, and 



2 2 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

found an empty room with four windows all in 
good condition, and a water supply two floors 
below, at a rent of a few shillings a week. I 
paid for a week in advance and went home, or- 
dering a grocer's van to call after lunch. The 
van drew up before the door. I announced its 
meaning, packed all my books into it, a railway 
rug, a bundle of clothes and my one large chair, 
said good-bye to my relations, and then, after 
lighting my clay pipe, and seating myself com- 
placently on the tailboard, gave the order to 
start. I was as Columbus setting forth to a New 
World, a gypsy striking his tent for unknown 
woods; I felt as if I had been a wanderer in a 
caravan from my childhood as I loosened my 
coat, opened one or two more buttons in the flan- 
nel shirt that I wore open at the neck, and saw 
the red brick houses slipping slowly away 
behind me. The pride of it, to be sitting behind 
a van that I had hired myself; to carry my own 
belongings to a place of my own choosing; to 
be absolutely a free man, whose most distant de- 
sires seemed instantly attainable. I have never 
known another afternoon like that. 

It was very warm, and the bushes in the tiny 
suburban gardens were grey with dust, and dust 
clouds blew up from the road, and circled about 
the back of the van, and settled on my face and 
in my nostrils as I broadened my chest and 
snuffed the air of independence. As we came 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 23 

through the busier thoroughfares, errand boys, 
and sometimes even loafers, who should have 
had a greater sympathy with me, jeered at my 
pipe and my clothes, doubtless encouraged by 
the boy who sat in front and drove, and was 
(I am sure of it) carrying on a winking con- 
versation. But I minded them no more than the 
dust. For was I not now a free Bohemian, on 
my way to the haunts of Savage, and Goldsmith, 
and Rossetti, and Lamb, and Whistler, and 
Steele, and Carlyle, and all the others whose 
names and histories I knew far better than their 
works! No, I will not do myself that injustice; 
I knew nothing of Carlyle's life, but his " Sartor 
Resartus " was my Bible; I knew little of Lamb, 
but I had had '^ Elia " bound privily in the 
covers of a school Caesar, to lessen the tedium of 
well-hated Latin lessons I remember being 
called upon to construe, and, with unthinking 
enjoyment, reciting aloud to an astonished class 
and master the praises of Roast Pork. I knew 
the works of these two better than their lives. 
And Carlyle had lived in Chelsea, whither my 
grocer's van of happiness was threading the 
suburban streets, and Lamb had lived in a court 
only a stone's throw from the office of the little 
newspaper whose payments for my juvenile 
essays had helped my ambition to o'erleap the 
Thames and find a lodging for itself. 

Over the Albert Bridge we moved as 



24 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

leisurely as the old horse chose to walk in the 
August sun, and then a little way to the left, and 
up to the King's Road, by way of Cheyne Walk 
and Bramerton Street, past the very house of 
Carlyle, and so near Leigh Hunt's old home 
that I could have changed the time of day with 
him had his kindly ghost been leaning from a 
window. And I thought of these men as I sat, 
placid and drunk with pride, on the tailboard 
of the van. Pipe after pipe I smoked, and the 
floating blue clouds hung peacefully in the air 
behind me, like the rings in the water made by 
a steady oarsman. Their frequency was the 
only circumstance that betrayed my nervousness. 

We turned into the King's Road, that was 
made to save King Charles's coach horses when 
he drove to see Nell Gwynne. We followed it 
to the World's End, where I thought of Con- 
greve's " Love for Love," and having the book 
with me in the van, I glanced, for pleasure, in 
the black print, though I knew the thing by 
heart, to the charming scene where Mrs. Frail 
and Mrs. Foresight banter each other on their 
indiscretions; you remember: Mrs. Foresight 
taunts her sister with driving round Covent 
Garden in a hackney coach, alone, with a man, 
and adds that it is a reflection on her own fair 
modesty, whereupon sprightly Mrs. Frail re- 
torts : 

" Pooh! here's a clutter, why should it reflect 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 25 

upon you? I don't doubt but that you have 
thought yourself happy in a hackney coach be- 
fore now. If I had gone to Knightsbridge, or 
to Chelsea, or to Spring Gardens, or Barn Elms 
with a man alone, something might have been 
said." 

"Why, was I ever in any of these places? 
What do you mean, sister? " 

" Was I? What do you mean? " 

" You have been at a worse place? " 

" I at a worse place, and with a man! " 

" I suppose you would not go alone to the 
World's End?" 

"The World's End? What, do you mean 
to banter me? " 

" Poor Innocent! You don't know that there 
is a place called the World's End? I'll swear 
you can keep your countenance purely; you'd 
make an admirable player. . . . But look 
you here, now — ^Where did you lose this gold 
bodkin? — Oh, sister, sister!" 

"My bodkin?" 

" Nay, 'tis yours; look at it." 

"Well, if you go to that, where did you find 
this bodkin? Oh, sister, sister — sister every 
way." 

Was ever a more admirable little scene to 
read upon the tailboard of a van on a hot sum- 
mer's day? I made my boy pull up and go in 
at the tavern and bring out a couple of pints of 



26 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

ale, old ale, one for me, for once his lord and 
my own master, and one for him to drink my 
health in, and the health of William Congreve, 
who doubtless drank here many years ago, when 
green fields spread between here and West- 
minster, and this was a little inn, a naughty little 
inn, where gay young men brought gay young 
women to talk private business in the country. 
I saw them sitting in twos outside the tavern 
with a bottle of wine before them on a trestle- 
board, and a pair of glasses, or perhaps one be- 
tween them, graven with the portrait of a tall 
ship, or a motto of love and good fellowship. 

And then, when the ale was done, we went 
on, and I forgot old Chelsea, the riverside vil- 
lage in the fields, to think upon how I was to 
spend the night in this new Chelsea, haunted, it 
was true, by the ghosts of winebibbers and 
painters and poets, but, to me who was to live 
in it, suddenly become as frightening and as 
solitary as an undiscovered land. 

In a street of grey houses we stopped at a 
corner where an alley turned aside; we stopped 
at the corner house, which was a greengrocer's 
shop. Slipping down from the tailboard of the 
van, I looked up at the desolate, curtainless win- 
dows of the top floor that showed where I was 
to sleep. 

The landlord was an observant, uncomfort- 
able wretch, who ran the shop on the ground 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 27 

floor, though in no way qualified for a green- 
grocer, a calling that demands something more 
of stoutness and juiciness of nature than ever he 
could show. He watched with his fingers in 
the pockets of his lean waistcoat the unloading 
of my van, without offering to help us, and when 
my vassal and I had carried the things up into 
the bare top room, he came impertinently in, 
and demanded " if this were all I had brought? 
Where was my furniture? He was for none of 
your carpet-bag lodgers." 

" I am just going out to get my furniture," I 
replied, and, as if by accident, let him see my 
one gold piece, while from another pocket I 
paid the boy the seven shillings agreed upon as 
the hire of the van, with an extra shilling 
for himself. He watched unimpressed, till I 
moved towards the door with such an air that 
he withdrew with a little more deference, 
though he chose to descend the stairs before me. 
I hated him. His manner had almost been a 
damper on my happiness. 

From the nearest grocer's shop I bought three 
shillings' worth of indifferently clean packing- 
cases, and paid an extra sixpence to have them 
taken home at once. I went on along the Ful- 
ham Road, buying apples, and cheese, and 
bread, and beer, till my pockets and arms were 
laden with as much as they could carry. When 
I returned, the boxes had been delivered, and 



28 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

my landlord was standing indignant in the 
middle of my room. 

"You must understand " he began at 

once. 

My temper was up. " I do," I replied. 
" Have you the key of the door? Thank you. 
Good-night," and smiled happily to myself as 
the shuffling footsteps of that mean-spirited 
greengrocer died away down the stairs. 

The lodging was a large square place, and did 
not (I admit it now, though I would have shot 
myself for the thought then) look very cheerful. 
Bare and irregular boards made its floor; its 
walls were dull grey-green; my books were 
piled in a cruelly careless heap in one corner, 
my purchases in another; the pile of packing 
cases in the middle made it appear the very 
lumber room it was. 

The boxes were soon arranged into a table and 
chairs. Two, placed one above the other on 
their sides, served for a cupboard. Three set 
end to end made an admirable bed. Indeed, my 
railway rug gave it an air of comfort, even of 
opulence, spread carefully over the top. The 
cheese was good, and also the beer, but I had 
forgotten to buy candles, and it was growing 
dark before that first untidy supper was finished. 
So I placed a packing-case chair by the open 
window, and dipped through a volume of 
poetry, an anthology of English ballads, that 



AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 29 

had been marked at ninepence on an open book- 
stall in the Charing Cross Road. 

But I did not read much. The sweet sum- 
mer air, cool in the evening, seemed to blow a 
kiss of promise on my forehead. The light was 
dying. I listened for the hoot of a steamer on 
the river, or the bells of London churches; I 
heard with elation the feet of passengers, whom 
I could see but dimly, beating on the pavement 
far below. A rough voice was scolding in the 
room under mine, and someone was singing a 
song. Now and again I looked at the poetry, 
though it was really too dark to see, and a thou- 
sand hopes and fears flitting across the page 
carried me out of myself, but not so far that I 
did not know that this was my first night of free- 
dom, that for the first time in my life I was alone 
in a room of my own, free to live for poetry, for 
philosophy, for all the things that seemed then 
to matter more than life itself. I thought of 
Crabbe coming to London with three pounds in 
his pockets, and a volume of poems; I thought 
of Chatterton, and laughed at myself, but was 
quite a little pleased at the thought. Brave 
dreams flooded my mind, and I sat content long 
after it was dusk and smoked, and sent with 
infinite enjoyment puffs of pale smoke out into 
the night. I did not go to bed at all, but fell 
asleep leaning on the window sill, to wake with 
a cold in my head. 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 




OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 



CHELSEA has waged more than a 
hundred years' war with the common 
sense of the multitude. Long before 
Leigh Hunt settled with his odd 
household in Upper Cheyne Row, with Carlyle 
for a neighbour, Chelsea had begun to deserve 
its reputation as a battlefield and bivouacking 
ground for art and literature. 

Somewhere about 1690 an inventive barber 
and ex-servant called Salter, who renamed him- 
self Don Saltero, with an eye to trade, set up at 
No. 18 Cheyne Walk a coffee-house and mad 
museum. Those who wished for coffee visited 
the museum, and those who came to view the 
curiosities — ^which were many and various, 
including a wild man of the woods, and the 
tobacco pipe of the Emperor of Morocco — re- 
freshed their minds with coffee. Some trades 
seem invented to provide the material of de- 
lightful literature; barbers especially are men 
whom the pen does but tickle to caress. Don 
Quixote met such an one in the adventure of the 

33 



34 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

helmet; Shibli Bagarag of Shiraz, the shaver 
of Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of 
Shoolpi, the son of ShuUum, was a second; and 
Don Saltero seems to have been just such an- 
other. Steele v^rote a laughing, friendly por- 
trait of him in the Tatler: 

" When I came into the Coffee House I had 
no time to salute the Company before my Eye 
was taken by ten thousand Gimcracks round the 
Room, and on the Ceiling. When my first as- 
tonishment was over comes to me a Sage of a 
thin and meagre Countenance; which aspect 
made me doubt whether Reading or Fretting 
had made him so philosophick. But I very soon 
perceived him to be of that Sect which the An- 
cients called Ginquistae; in our Language 
Tooth Drawers. I immediately had a respect 
for the man; for these practical philosophers go 
upon a very rational Hypothesis, not to cure but 
to take away the Part affected. My Love of 
Mankind made me very benevolent to Mr. 
Salter, for such is the name of this Eminent 
Barber and Antiquary." 

Steele was not the only man of letters who 
loved the place. Doctor Tobias Smollett, when 
he lived in Chelsea, used to stroll in here of an 
afternoon. On Sundays he was busy feeding 
poor authors at his own house on " beef, pud- 
ding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert's 
Entire butt-beer," but on week days he went 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 35 

often to Don Saltero's, where he may have seen 
Benjamin Franklin, a journeyman printer, duti- 
fully examining the place as one of the London 
sights. Indeed, against the inexcusable auto- 
biography of that austere, correct fellow we 
must set the fact of his swim back from Chelsea 
down to Blackf riars. We can forgive him much 
righteousness for that. But Steele's is the pleas- 
antest memory of the old museum. I think of 
the meagre barber, proud of his literary patrons, 
serving coffee to them in the room decorated 
with gimcracks on ceiling, walls, and floor; but 
I should have loved above all to see Steele swing 
in, carelessly dressed, with his whole face smil- 
ing as he showed Mr. Salter his little advertise- 
ment in the lazy pages of the Tatler, fresh and 
damp from the press. 

Though No. 18 has long been a private house, 
Chelsea still knows such characters as the man 
who made it famous. I lost sight of one of them 
only a year or two ago. I forget his name, but he 
called himself the " P. B.,'' which letters stood 
for " The Perfect Bohemian.'' He wrote most 
abominably bad verses, and kept a snug little 
restaurant in the Fulham Road, a happy little 
feeding house after the old style, now, alas! 
fallen into a more sedate proprietorship. Half 
a dozen of us used to go there at one time, and 
drank coffee and ate fruit stewed by the poet 
himself. We sat on summer evenings in a small 



36 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

partly roofed yard behind the house. Creepers 
hung long trails with fluttering leaves over green 
painted tables, and, as dark came on, the P.B. 
v^ould light Japanese lanterns that swung among 
the foliage, and then, sitting on a table, would 
read his poetry aloud to his customers. The 
restaurant did not pay better than was to be 
expected, and the P.B. became an artist's model. 
He was fine-looking, with curly hair, dark eyes, 
a high brow, and the same meagreness about his 
face that Steele noticed in the ingenious barber. 
I hope he made a fortune as a model. He must 
have been an entertaining sitter. 

I had been looking for a picture of old irregu- 
lar family life when I came on Carlyle's de- 
scription of the Hunts. It is curious how slowly 
Bohemia changes. The last fifty years, that 
have altered almost everything else, have left 
the little Bohemian family life that there is very 
like this, at any rate in essentials : 

" Hunt's household. Nondescript! Un- 
utterable! Mrs. Hunt asleep on cushions; four 
or five beautiful, strange, gypsy-looking chil- 
dren running about in undress, whom the lady 
ordered to get us tea. The eldest boy, Percy — 
a sallow black-haired youth of sixteen, with a 
kind of dark cotton nightgown on — went whirl- 
ing about like a familiar, pervading everything; 
an indescribable dreamlike household. . . . 
Hunt's house excels all you have ever heard of 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 37 

... a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel 
even in literature. In his family room, where 
are a sickly large wife and a whole school of 
well-conditioned wild children, you will find 
half a dozen old rickety chairs gathered from 
half a dozen different hucksters, and all seem- 
ing engaged, and just pausing, in a violent horn- 
pipe. On these and round them and over the 
dusty table and ragged carpets lie all kinds of 
litter — books, paper, eggshells, and, last night 
when I was there, the torn half of a half-quar- 
tern loaf. His own room above stairs, into 
which alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. 
It has only two chairs, a book-case and a writing 
table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his 
Tinkerdom in the spirit of a King, apologises 
for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a 
window sill himself if there is no other, and 
then, folding closer his loose flowing " muslin 
cloud " of a printed nightgown, in which he al- 
ways writes, commences the liveliest dialogue 
on philosophy and the prospects of man (who is 
to be beyond measure happy yet), which again 
he will courteously terminate the moment you 
are bound to go." 

As for Carlyle's own house, just round the 
corner, he left a description of that, too, in a 
letter to his wife, written to her when he took it. 

"... on the whole a most massive, roomy, 
sufficient old house, with places, for example, 



38 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

to hang, say, three dozen hats or cloaks on, and 
as many curious and queer old presses and 
shelved closets (all tight and well painted in 
their way) as would satisfy the most covetous 
Goody: rent thirty-five pounds. . . . We lie 
safe at a bend of the river, away from all the 
great roads, have air and quiet hardly inferior 
to Craigenputtock, an outlook from the back 
windows into more leafy regions, with here 
and there a red high-peaked old roof looking 
through, and see nothing of London except by 
day the summits of St. Paul's Cathedral and 
Westminster Abbey, and by night the gleam of 
the great Babylon, affronting the peaceful skies. 
The house itself is probably the best we have 
ever lived in — a right old strong roomy brick 
house built nearly one hundred and fifty years 
ago, and likely to see three races of these modern 
fashionables come down." 

There it stands still, and in a way to fulfil the 
prophecy. The houses have closed in about its 
quiet street. The little villagery of Chelsea has 
been engulfed in the lava stream of new cheap 
buildings. The King's Road thunders with 
motor 'buses and steam vans, but here in this 
quiet Cheyne Row the sun yet falls as peace- 
fully as ever on the row of trees along the pave- 
ment, and, over the way, on the stiff front of the 
" sufficient old house," in at the windows where 
Carlyle sat and smoked long pipes with Tenny- 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 

son, and talked to " my old 
friend Fitzgerald, who 
might have spent his time 
to much better purpose than^ 
in busying himself with the 
verses of that old Mahome- 
tan blackguard," Omar 
Khayyam. They tell me 
that upstairs is still the 
double-walled room where 
so many groans were hurled 
at unnecessary noises and 
the evils of digestion, and 
where, in spite of all, so 
many great books came 
alive on the paper. There 
is a medallion on the front 
of the house, and visitors 
are allowed to nose about 
inside. But it is 
better to forget the 
visitors, as you 
look down that 
shady street on a 
summer's day, and 
to think only of 
the old poet-phi- 
losopher who was 
so happy there and 
so miserable, and 



39 




40 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

loved so well the river that flows stately past 
the foot of the street. There, looking out over 
the water, from the narrow gardens along 
Cheyne Walk, you may see his statue, the patron 
saint of so many wilfully bad-tempered fellows, 
who cannot, as he could, vindicate their bad- 
temper by their genius. 

The river made Chelsea the place it is, a place 
different specially from every other suburb of 
the town. Mr. G. K. Chesterton says he loves 
Battersea, " because it is the only suburb that re- 
tains a local patriotism." Chelsea has a local 
patriotism, too, but of another kind, the patriot- 
ism of members of the foreign legion. Chelsea 
does not breed artists, she adopts them; but they 
would die for her. But apart from this patriot- 
ism, she has a local atmosphere that has nothing 
to do with the artists, the feeling of a riverside 
village that not even the rival highway of the 
King's Road has been able to destroy. Chelsea 
was once such a place for Londoners as Chert- 
sey is now. People came there to be near the 
river. Visitors to the World's End, then the 
limit of fashion, where gallants brought their 
Mrs. Frails, came by boat. Big country houses 
were built round about. Sir Thomas More's 
house, where he entertained Holbein and the ob- 
servant Erasmus, was built in 1521 where Beau- 
fort Street is now, and had " a pleasajnt prospect 
of the Thames and the fields beyond." And all 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 41 

the best memories of old Chelsea rest in the nar- 
row stately fronted houses along Cheyne Walk, 
or in the little taverns by the riverside, or in the 
narrov^ streets that run up from the Embank- 
ment, just as the village streets might have been 
expected to run up from the banks of the stream 
v^hen, in the old days, people came here to 
bathe and be merry in the sunshine. 

Three of those Cheyne Walk houses must be 
mentioned here. In 1849 some members of 
the nev^ly-established Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
hood looked over No. 16, " v^ith v^hich they 
v^ere greatly taken. It is capable of furnishing 
four good studios, with a bedroom, and a little 
room that would do for a library, attached to 
each. * P. R. B.' might be written on the door, 
and stand for * Please Ring the Bell ' to the pro- 
fane. . . ." How cheerful that is! But the 
house was not taken till a dozen years after- 
wards, when Rossetti, whose life had been 
broken by the death of his wife nine months 
before, took it with Swinburne and Meredith. 
In the back garden he kept all manner of strange 
beasts — zebus, armadillos, and the favourite of 
all, the wombat, an animal almost canonised by 
the Pre-Raphaelites. " Do you know the wom- 
bat at the Zoo?" asked Rossetti, before he had 
one of his own, " a delightful creature, the most 
comical little beast." They used in the early 
days to make pilgrimages to Regent's Park on 



42 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

purpose to see it, and in Lady Burne-Jones's life 
of her husband she records how the windows in 
the Union at Oxford, whitened while Morris 
and Rossetti and the rest were decorating, were 
covered with sketches of wombats in delightful 
poses. I wish I could get a picture of one to 
make a jolly island in the text of this book. 

Going west along Cheyne Walk, past Oakley 
Street and the statue of Carlyle, past old Chelsea 
Church, we come to Whistler's lofty studio- 
house, a grey magnificence of which it is impos- 
sible to tire. Here lived Whistler in his own 
way, and flaunted his own way of living. He 
had some sport with his life. There is a tale told 
of him before he lived here, when he had the 
White House in Tite Street, that is very perti- 
nent to this book, and is the more interesting in 
that it is the duplicate of one Sir Richard Steele's 
exploits. Mr. William Rossetti gives the story 
in his big book of reminiscences, and Johnson in 
almost the same terms tells the same tale of 
Steele, who is known to have rented a house 
somewhere along the waterside. Here is the 
Steele story; the Whistler is exactly similar, but 
I have not the book in the house : 

" Sir Richard Steele one day having invited 
to his house a great number of persons of the 
first quality, they were surprised at the number 
of liveries which surrounded the table; and after 
dinner, when wine and mirth had set them free 




ROSSETTI'S HOUSE IN CHEYNE WALK 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 43 

from the observations of a rigid ceremony, one 
of them inquired of Sir Richard how such an 
expensive train of domestics could be consistent 
with his fortunes. Sir Richard very frankly 
confessed that they were fellows of whom he 
would willingly be rid. And then, being asked 
why he did not discharge them, declared that 
they were bailiffs, who had introduced them- 
selves with an execution, and whom, since he 
could not send them away, he had thought it 
convenient to embellish with liveries, that they 
might do him credit while they stayed." 

Johnson does not say whether it was in 
Chelsea that this occurred. So it is safer, and at 
least as pleasant, to read Whistler for Steele, 
and imagine the dinner party in Tite Street. 
The humour of it would have delighted either 
of these very different men. Whistler must have 
carried it off with a superb nicety, but it is not 
told that his friends paid up, and set him free, 
as they did for Dick Steele. It is possible he 
would have resented it. 

Further along Cheyne Walk, beyond Batter- 
sea Bridge, where the stately houses dwindle 
into a regular little riverside street, with 
cottages, and nondescript shops, and nautical 
taverns, with old quays and landing stairs just 
over the way, is No. 118, a tiny red-tiled house, 
a little below the level of the street, set back 
between an inn and a larger house, behind 



44 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

faded wooden palings, and a few shrubs. There 
are birds' nests in the creepers that cover the 
walls and twist about the windows. Here 
Turner lived under an assumed name (they 
thought him an old sea captain) and climbed 
the roof to watch the sunsets, as a retired sailor 
might watch for small shipping coming down 
the river. Here he died in 1851, a tired old 
man, only a few years after Ruskin had proved 
to the world that of all modern painters he was 
the greatest and least honoured. 

Now, in the twentieth century, the riverside 
streets only live their old lives in the minds of 
the young and unsuccessful who walk their 
pavements in the summer evenings. Those who 
rent houses in Tite Street or in Cheyne Walk 
live nicely and reverently. They are either 
more respectable than Steele or Whistler or 
less magnificent. Bohemia has moved a little 
further from the river. The river has given 
place to the King's Road as Chelsea's main 
artery, and now the old exuberant life is lived 
not in the solemn beautiful houses by the water- 
side, nor in the taverns by the deserted quays, 
but in the studios and squares and narrow streets 
along the other thoroughfare. There is Glebe 
Place, full of studios; there is Bramerton Street, 
and Flood Street, and then there is modern Chel- 
sea, a long strip of buildings cut by narrow 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 45 

streets, between the King's Road and the Ful- 
ham Road. Studios are dotted all about, and at 
least half the ugly, lovable little houses keep a 
notice of "Apartments to Let" permanently in 
the windows, an apt emblem of the continual 
flitting that is charateristic of the life. 

But there is a time in the evening when the 
irregulars of these days cross the King's Road 
and unsurp the Bohemia of the past. When it 
grows too dark for painters to judge the colours 
of their pictures, they flock out from the studios, 
some to go up to Soho for dinner, some to stroll 
with wife or friendly model in the dusk. The 
favourite promenade is along Cheyne Walk, 
where the lamps shining among the leaves of 
the trees cast wavering shadows on the pave- 
ments. Only the black-and-white men, work- 
ing against time for the weekly papers, plug on 
through the dark. Now and again, walking 
the streets, you may look up at a window and 
see a man busily drawing, with a shaded lamp 
throwing a bright light on the Bristol-board 
before him. For myself, I soon discovered that 
the dusk was meant for indolence, and always, 
a little before sunset, threaded my way to the 
King's Road, and so to the river. I would leave 
the spider strength of the Albert Bridge behind 
me, and stroll on past Battersea Bridge to a 
promontory of embankment just beyond, the 
best of all places for seeing the sunsets up the 



46 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

river, and the blue mists about those four tall 
chimneys of the electric generating station. I 
used to lean on the balustrade there and watch 
the green and golden glow fade away from 
the sky where those great obelisks towered up, 
and think of Turner on the roof of the little 
house close by; I would watch the small boats 
bobbing on their ropes, and listen for the noises 
of the King's Road behind the buildings to the 
right, or the clangour of the factories on the 
other side of the water. And then I would 
turn, and watch the butterflies of fire flash out 
of the dusk and perch along the bridge in glit- 
tering clusters. As the dark fell, lights shone 
out along the Embankment, climbed slowly 
up the rigging of the boats by the wharf, and 
lit up the square windows of the houses and 
taverns by the waterside. Often, walking 
along, when the reflections followed me with 
long indexes across the water as I moved, 
when the tugs coming round the bend of the 
river lit up their red and green, when over 
everything hung that mist so miraculously 
blue that it took a Whistler to perceive it, I 
have thought of the old times when kings and 
philosophers bathed in the reeds here, and 
when at night there were no lights at all, 
except where the sailors were merry in a 
tavern, or a Steele was giving a party in one 
of the big houses. I have thought of Chelsea 



OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 47 

and her river in those days, and Chelsea and 
her river in ours, and then, as I have looked 
again along the glimmering Embankment, or 
seen a poet and a girl pass by arm-in-arm, with 
eyes wide open to that spangled loveliness 
that smiles undaunted by the stars, I have 
thought it not impossible that we are the 
more fortunate in knowing Chelsea now. 



A CHELSEA EVENING 




A CHELSEA EVENING 

CHELSEA seemed, in spite of all its 
memories, a desolate, lonely place 
when I woke sitting on the packing 
case by the window of my lodging 
on the morning after my arrival. It became 
populous with friends, through circumstances 
so typical of the snowball growth of acquaint- 
anceship, and of one kind of Chelsea life, that 
they deserve a description in detail. 

The only man I knew in Chelsea was a Jap- 
anese artist who had been my friend in even 
earlier days, when both he and I had been too 
poor to buy tobacco. We had known each other 
pretty well, and he had come to Chelsea some 
months before. I called on him, and found him 
lodging in a house where he shared a sitting- 
room with an actor. This man, called Wilton, 
was such an actor that he seemed a very cari- 
cature of his own species. It was a delight to 
watch him. He was lying at full length on a 
dilapidated sofa, so arranged that he could, 
without moving, see his face in a mirror on the 
other side of the room. He was very long, and 
in very long fingers he held a cigarette. Some- 

51 



52 



BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



times, with the other hand, he would rumple the 
thick black hair over his forehead, and then he 
would open his eyes as wide as he could, and 
glance with satisfaction towards the looking- 
glass. The Japanese, twinkling with mirth, was 
seated straddlewise round the back of a chair by 
the fireplace, and was trying eagerly, with short 
flashes of uncertain English, to reason the actor 
into a piece of common sense about his pro- 
fession. He jumped up when I came in, and 
the actor languidly introduced himself. Then 
they continued the discussion. Wilton refused 
to believe that observation was in any way neces- 
sary to his art. 

" Pluck," he said, with a magnificent gesture, 
" your characters from your own heart and soul. 
If I act a king, I will be a king in my own right, 
and find all majesty and pride in my own con- 



sciousness." 



I thought privily that he might find that easy, 
but the Japanese, reasoning more seriously, con- 
tinued: " But if you were going to act an idiot 
or a drunkard, would not you " 

" No, I would not. Every man, or all great 
men, have all possibilities within them. I could 
be divinely mad without ever wasting time in 
watching the antics of a madman." 

" But do you tell us you would dare to act 
the drunkard without watching to see how he 
walks, and how he talks and sings? Would you 



A CHELSEA EVENING 53 

act an old woman and get true like, without see- 
ing first an old woman to copy the mumbling of 
her lips?" 

"Ah," said the actor, with delighted logic, 
" but I would never act an old woman. And 
you are losing your temper, my dear fellow. 
Some day, when you consider the matter more 
calmly, you will realise that I am right. But 
do not let men of genius quarrel over an argu- 
ment." 

And then, as the Japanese smiled unperceived 
at me, and rolled a cigarette, the superb Wilton 
turned himself a little on the sofa, rearranged 
a cushion beneath his elbow, and began a long 
half-intoned speech about newspapers, the folly 
of reading them, the inconceivable idiocy of 
those who write for them, and so forth, while I 
agreed with him at every point, and the 
Japanese, who knew by means of livelihood, 
chuckled quietly to himself. 

The actor was happy. Flattered by my con- 
tinual agreement, the billows of his argument 
rolled on and broke with increasing din along 
the shores of silence. The only other sound be- 
sides the long roll of his impassioned dogma was 
the low murmur of my assent. Give a fool a 
proselyte, and he will be ten times happier than 
a sage without one. Wilton must have enjoyed 
that afternoon. He thought he had a proselyte 
in me, and he talked like a prophet, till I won- 



54 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dered how it could be possible for any one man's 
brain to invent such flood of nonsense. 1 was 
happy under it all if only on account of the quiet 
quizzical smile of the Japanese, who was mak- 
ing a sketch of the orator's face. 

The end of it was that he fell in love with an 
audience so silent, so appreciative, and decided 
that he must really have me with him that night, 
at the house of a lady who once a week gave an 
open party for her friends. I was wanted, it was 
clear, as a foil to his brilliance. It was at least 
an adventure, and I agreed to come. What 
was the lady's name, I asked, and what was 
she? 

He was too impatient to go on with his ha- 
rangue to tell me anything except that she was an 
artist, and that at her rooms I would meet the 
best poets and painters and men and women of 
spirit in the town. " Indeed," he added, " I go 
there myself, regularly, once a week." 

A red-haired serving maid brought up tea 
at this moment, before he had again got fairly 
into the swing of his discourse, and he withheld 
his oratory to give directions for us, as to the 
quantities of milk and sugar we should mix for 
him, together with a little general information 
on the best methods of drinking tea. The Japan- 
ese set a chair by the sofa for him, and I carried 
him his cup and saucer, and a plate of bread and 
butter from the table. He ate and drank in 



A CHELSEA EVENING 55 

silence for a moment, and then broke out again 
in florid talk about slavery on sugar plantations, 
the text being the two lumps which, at his 
orders, had been placed in his saucer. After tea 
he went on talking, talking, talking, until eight 
in the evening, when he went upstairs to put on 
a clean collar and to rearrange his hair. 

Presently he reappeared, with a curl above his 
forehead. He suggested that we should start. 
The Japanese excused himself from accompany- 
ing us, and went down to the river to make 
studies for some painting upon which he was 
engaged. We set off together down the Fulham 
Road, in the most beautiful light of a summer 
evening. There was a glow in the sky that 
was broken by the tall houses, and the tower of 
the workhouse lifted bravely up into the sunset. 
Below, in the blue shadows of the street, people 
were moving, and some of the shops had lights 
in them. It was a perfect night, and completely 
wasted on the actor, and indeed on me too, for I 
was intent on observing him. Now and again, 
as he strode along the pavement, a girl would 
turn to look at his tall figure, and it was plain 
that he noticed each such incident with pleasure. 
When we came among the shops he would now 
and again do his best to catch sight of himself 
in the glasses of the windows, and occasionally 
to this end would stop with a careless air, and 
light a cigarette, or roll one, or throw one away 



56 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

into the road. The whole world was a pageant 
to him, with himself a central figure. 

At last we turned to the right, between houses 
with narrow gardens and little trees in front of 
them, and then to the right again, till we stopped 
at the end of a short street. ** Her name is 
Gypsy," he said dramatically. " No one ever 
calls her anything else." Then he swung open 
the garden gate, walked up the steps of the 
house, and knocked vigorously on the door. 
Through a window on the left I had caught a 
glimpse of a silver lamp, and a brazen candle- 
stick, and a weird room in shaded lamplight. I 
was tiptoe with excitement. For I was very 
young. 

Someone broke off in a song inside, and quick 
steps shuffled in the passage. The door was 
flung open, and we saw a little round woman, 
scarcely more than a girl, standing in the 
threshold. She looked as if she had been the 
same age all her life, and would be so to the end. 
She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that 
hung loose over a green skirt, with black tassels 
sewn all over the orange silk, like the frills on a 
red Indian's trousers. She welcomed us with a 
little shriek. It was the oddest, most uncanny 
little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It 
made me very shy. It was obviously an affecta- 
tion, and yet seemed just the right manner of 
welcome from the strange little creature, " god- 



A CHELSEA EVENING 57 

daughter of a witch and sister to a fairy," who 
uttered it. She was very dark, and not thin, and 
when she smiled, with a smile that was pecu- 
liarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes 
seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the 
door they were the eyes of a joyous, excited child 
meeting the guests of a birthday party. 

The actor shook hands, and, in his annoying, 
laughable, dramatic manner, introduced me as 
"a clever young man who has read philosophy." 
I could have kicked him. 

"Come in!" she cried, and went shuffling 
down the passage in that heavy parti-coloured 
dress. 

We left our hats and followed her into a mad 
room out of a fairy tale. As soon as I saw it I 
knew she could live in no other. It had been 
made of two smaller chambers by the removal 
of the partition wall, and had the effect of 
a well-designed curiosity shop, a place that 
Gautier would have loved to describe. The 
walls were dark green, and covered with bril- 
liant-coloured drawings, etchings, and pastel 
sketches. A large round table stood near the 
window, spread with bottles of painting inks 
with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, 
paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette 
boxes, and books ; it was lit up by a silver lamp, 
and there was an urn in the middle of it, in 
which incense was burning. A woolly monkey 



58 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

perched ridiculously on a pile of portfolios, and 
grinned at the cast of a woman's head, that stood 
smiling austerely on the top of a black cupboard, 
in a medley of Eastern pottery and Indian gods. 
The mantel-shelves, three stories high, were 
laden with gimcracks. A low bookcase, crammed 
and piled with books, was half hidden un- 
der a drift of loose pieces of music. An old 
grand piano, on which two brass bedroom can- 
dlesticks were burning, ran back into the inner 
room, where in the darkness was a tall mirror, 
a heap of crimson silks, and a low table with an- 
other candle flickering among the bottles and 
glasses on a tray. Chairs and stools were 
crowded everywhere, and on a big blue sofa 
against the wall a broadly whiskered picture- 
dealer was sitting, looking at a book of Jap- 
anese prints. 

We had scarcely been introduced to him, and 
settled into chairs, while the little woman in the 
orange coat was seating herself on a cushion, 
when a quick tap sounded on the window-pane. 
"The Birds!" she cried, and ran back into the 
passage. A moment or two later she came back, 
and a pair of tiny artists, for all the world like 
happy sparrows, skipped into the room. The 
actor knew them, and welcomed them in his 
magnificent way. They were the Benns, and had 
but recently married; she modelled in clay and 
wax, and he was painter newly come from Paris. 



A CHELSEA EVENING 59 

Two people better deserving their nickname 
would be hard to find. They flitted about the 
place, looking at the new prints hung on the 
walls, at the new china toy that Gypsy had been 
unable to deny herself, and chattering all the 
time. Benn and I were soon friendly, and he 
presently asked me to visit his studio. Just as 
he gave me a card with his address upon it, for 
which he had to ask his wife, he was caught by 
a sudden remembrance, and turning about asked 
Gypsy point blank across the broadside of con- 
versation, " I say, you haven't such a thing as 
a big sword, have you? " Oh, yes, but she had, 
and in a minute the two little people were look- 
ing at a gigantic two-edged sword, as long as 
either of them, that hung from a hook on the 
wall. The actor, with a delighted exhibition of 
grace and height, reached it easily down, and 
Benn was for swinging it at once, with all the 
strength that he had, if his wife had not instantly 
brought him to sense and saved the place from 
devastation. Instead, he described the picture 
he was painting. The central figure, he told us, 
was to be an old knight looking regretfully at 
the armour and weapons he had used in his 
youth. This was the very sword for his pur- 
pose. 

Just then there was another tap, and two 
women came in together. The first was a tall, 
dark Scottish girl, with a small head and a beau- 



6o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

tiful, graceful neck, very straight and splendid 
(I called her the Princess at once in my fan- 
tastic boyhood), and the other a plump, jolly 
American. 

As soon as the shaking of hands was all over 
someone asked Gypsy for a song. " Got very 
little voice to-night," she coughed, " and every- 
body wants something to drink first. But I'll 
sing you a song afterwards." She went through 
to the table with the glasses in the inner room. 
"Who is for opal hush?" she cried, and all, 
except the American girl and the picture dealer, 
who preferred whisky, declared their throats 
were dry for nothing else. Wondering what the 
strange-named drink might be, I too asked for 
opal hush, and she read the puzzlement in my 
face. "You make it like this," she said, and 
squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass of 
red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam 
rose shimmering to the brim. " The Irish poets 
over in Dublin called it so ; and once, so they say, 
they went all round the town and asked at every 
public-house for two tall cymbals and an opal 
hush. They did not get what they wanted very 
easily, and I do not know what a tall cymbal 
may be. But this is the opal hush." It was very 
good, and as I drank I thought of those Irish 
poets, whose verses had meant much to me, and 
sipped the stuff with reverence as if it had been 
nectar from Olympus. 



A CHELSEA EVENING 6i 

When everybody had their glasses, Gypsy 
came back into the front part of the room, and, 
sitting in a high-backed chair that was covered 
with gold and purple embroideries, she cleared 
her throat, leaned forward so that the lamplight 
fell on her weird little face, and sang, to my 
surprise, the old melody: 

* O the googoo bird Is a giddy bird, 

No other is zo gay. 
O the googoo bird is a merry bird, 

Her zingeth all day. 
Her zooketh zweet flowers 

To make her voice clear, 
And when her cryeth googoo, googoo, 

The zummer draweth near." 

Somehow I had expected something else. It 
seemed odd to hear that simple song drop word 
by word in the incense-laden atmosphere of that 
fantastic room. 

After that she chanted in a monotone one of 
the poems from Mr. Yeats's "Wind Among the 
Reeds": 

" I went out into the hazel wood, 
Because a fire was in my head, 
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
And hooked a berry to a thread." 

• • • • • 

And then the stately Scottish girl sat down at 
the old piano, and after playing an indolent 



62 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

little melody over the faded yellow keys, 
brought out in tinkling sweetness the best of all 
the songs that have ever come to London from 
the sea. Nearly all the company knew it by 
heart and sang together: 



" Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies, 
Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain ; 
For we've received orders for to sail for Old England, 
And we may never see you, fair ladies, again. 

" So we'll rant and we'll roar, like true British sailors. 
We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas. 
Until we strike anchor in the channel of Old England; 
From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues." 



It is no wonder that such a lad as I was then 
should find the scene quite unforgettable. 
There was the beautiful head of the pianist, 
swaying a little with her music, and the weird 
group beside her — Gypsy in the orange coat 
leaning over her shoulder, the two small artists, 
on tiptoe, bending forward to remind them- 
selves of the words, the hairy picture-dealer 
smiling on them benignantly, the actor posing 
against the mantelpiece, the plump American 
leaning forward with her elbows on the table, 
her chin in her hands, a cigarette between her 
lips, with the background of that uncanny room, 
with the silver lamp, the tall column of smoke 



A CHELSEA EVENING 63 

from the incense urn, and the mad colours, that 
seemed, like the discordant company, to har- 
monise perfectly in those magical surround- 
ings. 

When the song was done, the actor told me 
how its melody had been taken down from an 
old sailor in this very room. The old fellow, 
brought here for the purpose, had been shy, as 
well he might be, and his mouth screwed into 
wrinkles so that no music would come from it. 
At last they made him comfortable on a chair, 
with a glass and a pipe, and built a row of 
screens all around him, that he might not be 
shamed. After a minute or two, when the 
smoke, rising in regular puffs above the screens, 
told them that he had regained his peace of 
mind, someone said, "Now, then!" and a 
trembling whistling of the tune had given a 
musician the opportunity to catch the ancient 
melody on the keyboard of the piano. They 
had thus the pride of a version of their own, for 
they did not know until much later that another 
had already been printed in a song-book. 

Presently the American girl begged for a 
story. Gypsy had spent some part of her life in 
the Indies, and knew a number of the old folk 
tales, of Annansee the spider, another Brer 
Rabbit in his cunning and shrewdness, and 
Chim Chim the little bird, and the singing 
turtle, and the Obeah Woman, who was a 



64 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

witch, "wid wrinkles deep as ditches on her 
brown face." She told them in the old dialect, 
in a manner of her own. Fastening a strip of 
ruddy tow about her head, so that it mingled 
with her own black hair, she flopped down on 
the floor, behind a couple of lighted candles, 
and, after a little introductory song that she 
had learned from a Jamaican nurse, told story 
after story, illustrating them with the help of 
wooden toys that she had made herself. She 
told them with such precision of phrasing that 
those who came often to listen soon had them 
by heart, and would interrupt her like children 
when, in a single word, she went astray. To 
hear her was to be carried back to the primitive 
days of story-telling, and to understand, a little, 
how it was that the stories of the old minstrels 
were handed on from man to man with so little 
change upon the way. 

That was my first evening of friendliness in 
Chelsea. For a long time after that I never 
let a week pass without going to that strange 
room to listen to the songs and tales, and to 
see the odd parties of poets and painters, actors 
and actresses, and nondescript irregulars who 
were there almost as regularly as I. Sometimes 
there would be half a dozen of us, sometimes 
twenty. Always we were merry. The evening 
was never wasted. There I heard poetry read 
as if the ghost of some old minstrel had de- 



A CHELSEA EVENING 65 

scended on the reader, and shown how the 
words should be chanted aloud. There I heard 
stories told that were yet unwritten, and talk 
that was so good that it seemed a pity that it 
never would be. There I joined in gay jousts 
of caricature. There was a visitors' book that 
we filled with drawings and rhymes. Every 
evening that we met we used its pages as a 
tournament field, 

" And mischievous and bold were the strokes we gave, 
And merrily were they received.'* 

There, too, we used to bring our work when 
we were busy upon some new thing, a painting, 
or a book, and work on with fresh ardour after 
cheers or criticism. 

The party broke up on that first night soon 
after the stories. We helped Gypsy to shut up 
the rooms and dowse the lights, and waved our 
good-nights to her as we saw her disappear into 
the house next door where she lodged. 

At the corner of the street the Benns and I 
were alone, to walk the same way. We went 
down the Fulham Road together, those two 
small people chattering of the new picture, and 
I, swinging the great sword that was to pose 
for it, walking by the side of them, rejoicing 
in my new life and in the weight and balance 
of the sword, a little pleased, boy that I was, to 



66 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

be so much bigger than they, and wondering 
whether, if I swung the sword with sufficient 
violence, I had the slightest chance of being 
rebuked by a policeman for carrying a drawn 
weapon in the streets. 



IN THE STUDIOS 




IN THE STUDIOS 

A LARGE bare room, with no furni- 
ture but a divan or a camp-bed, a 
couple of chairs, an easel, and a 
model-stand made of a big box that 
holds a few coats and hats and coloured silks 
that do duty in a dozen pictures ; a big window 
slanting up across the roof, with blinds to tem- 
per its light; canvases and old paintings with- 
out frames leaning against the walls ; the artist, 
his coat off ready for work, strolling up and 
down with a cigarette between his lips, looking 
critically and lovingly at the canvas on the easel, 
and now and again pulling out his watch : that 
is a fair picture of a studio at about half-past 
ten on a workaday morning. 
There is a tap on the door. 
*^ Come in!" and a girl slips into the room, 
apologises for the thousandth time in her life 
for being so late, and proceeds to change her 
clothes for the costume that will make her the 
subject he wants for his picture, and then, taking 
the chair on the top of the costume-box, assumes 
the pose in which she yesterday began to sit. 
While she has been getting ready, he has made 

69 



70 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

his last preparations, and turned the key in the 
door, so that no chance outsider may stumble in 
and discompose his model. 

He looks at his rough drawing, and then at 
the girl. " We'll get to work now — Your arm 
was hanging a little further back — Yes — And 
your head is not quite — That's better — So — Arc 
you easy? We had it natural yesterday " 

"How is this?" She alters herself slightly, 
and the artist steps back to have another look 
in order to arrange the drapery. 

" There's only one thing wrong now," he will 
say. " We must just get that dark shadow that 
there was below your knee." 

The girl twists her skirt over, so that it falls 
in a crease, and gives the streak of dark that he 
had missed. 

"That's it. Well done, Serafinal" he ex- 
claims, and is instantly at work. He has 
already arranged the blinds over the window 
so that the light is as it was when he began the 
painting. 

As he paints he tries to keep up some kind 
of conversation with the girl, so that her mind 
may be alive, and not allow her to go rigid like 
a lay figure. 

"You are giving me the whole day?" he 
will ask, although the matter has been settled 
already. 

Gradually, as he grows absorbed in the paint- 



IN THE STUDIOS 71 

ing, he has even less brain to spare, and the talk 
becomes more and more mechanical; but if 
Serafina is the right kind of model she will do 
her share of keeping herself amused. 

"What have you got for lunch? " she asks. 

" Four eggs!" 

"What way shall we cook them, do you 
think? " 

" You know how to scramble them. Four 
eggs are enough for that? " 

"Yes. I'll scramble them — you have milk? 
—and butter?" 

" Got them first thing this morning. By the 
way, I met Martin at breakfast. YouVe posed 
for him, haven't you?" 

And so the talk goes on, like the talk of pup- 
pets, she just passing the time, trying to keep 
interested and real without moving out of her 
pose; he slashing in the rough work, bringing 
head, neck, shoulders, the turn of the waist, the 
fold of the skirt, into their places on the canvas. 
Then he begins to paint in the details, and is 
able to tell her what he is about. 

" I've done with the right arm for the present. 
Busy with the face," he says, and she is able 
to move her arm with relief, and bend it to and 
fro if it is getting cramped. 

It is far more tiring than you would think to 
remain motionless in a particular pose. The 
model stiffens insensibly, so that an interval of 



72 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

rest is as necessary for the success of the paint- 
ing as it is for her own comfort. For a minute 
or two she will be luxurious in leaving her pose, 
and he will walk anxiously up and down, look- 
ing at the picture, seeking faults, and plotting 
what to do next with it. And then, with less 
trouble than at first, she will take her pose again, 
and he will paint on, and talk emptiness as 
before. 

At last his wrist begins to tire, and he 
glances at his watch. 

''We'll have lunch now. I expect you are 
ready for it, too.'' He puts down brush and 
palette, and flings himself on a divan opposite 
the easel, where he can see the picture. For 
he works on at it in his head, even when he is 
not painting. She slips down from the model- 
stand and puts a match to the little oil stove on 
the soap box in the corner, takes the eggs and 
milk and butter out of the cupboard, and sets 
about making ^ufs brouilles, the favourite dish 
of half the studios in the world. 

Then she will come and look at the picture, 
and tell him how well and rapidly it is coming 
together, and what a nice splash of colour the 
crimson silk gives where the light falls on it. 
They will sit down to lunch if there is a table, 
or if not, will walk about the room, eating the 
^SS- ^^'ith spoons out of saucers, and munching 
bread and butter. The kettle will be boiling 



IN THE STUDIOS 73 

briskly on the stove, and they will make a little 
brew of coffee, and take a quarter of an hour 
of leisure, with cigarettes and coffee-cups, before 
going on with the w^ork. 

They are lucky if they can work on long 
after four o'clock without another knock sound- 
ing at the door. There are as many again lazy 
fellows who go about to w^aste time as there 
are hard-working artists. Surely enough, when 
the picture is all juicy and pliable, when all is 
going as a painter loves it best, there will come 
a tap at the locked door. 

" Oh, curse! " says the artist under his breath, 
and paints on, pretending not to hear. Tap 
comes the knock again. He flings down his 
brushes, turns the key, and opens the door to 
the interrupter, one of those pleasant, friendly 
people who never seem to have anything to do. 
" Oh, it's you, is it? " he says, as graciously as 
he can. " Come in." 

The man, genial, full of chatter, as they all 
are, comes in, volubly apologetic. " Look 
here," he says, '' don't let me disturb your work. 
Oh, hullo! How are you, Serafina? He's 
doing well w^ith you this time. You'll be in 
all the papers, my dear, and then you'll be too 
proud to pose for any but swells. Yes, I'll have 
a cigarette; and now, look here, don't stop work- 
ing on my account. Go on painting. I'll be 
making you two some tea." 



74 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

For a few minutes, as he warms the tea- 
pot, and brings the tea out of the cupboard, and 
drops in the recognised four teaspoonfuls, one 
for each of them, and one for the pot, the painter 
works desperately on. Presently the interrupter 
walks up to have another look at the picture. 
He stands at the painter's elbow, buttering the 
bosom of a loaf of bread, and cutting it off in 
thick rounds. "What are you going to put 
in, to bring the light up into that corner? " he 
asks, pointing with the butter-knife. 

" I was thinking of a silver pot: what do you 
think yourself? Anyhow, Serafina, weVe 
earned our tea." So work comes to an end for 
the day. That is the sole virtue of the inter- 
rupter — he keeps other people from overwork- 
ing themselves, and Serafina at least is grateful. 

All three will discuss the picture; how its 
lights and shadows are to be arranged into 
repose, and prevented from playing battledore 
and shuttlecock with the observer's eye; what 
colours are to be heightened, what toned down ; 
what artifice of detail, what careful obscurity is 
to be introduced, and where; and so on, in a 
jargon incomprehensible to the lay mind, as the 
talk of any other trade. The discussion is not 
only between the artists; Serafina will bear her 
share, and likely enough make the most useful 
of the suggestions. For artist's models are not 
hampered, like the painters themselves, by 




WORK. 



IN THE STUDIOS 75 

knowing too much, and at the same time they 
are not ignorant as the ordinary picture buyer 
is ignorant. Some of them have been brought 
up in the studios from their earliest childhood, 
and all spend so much of their lives with the 
artists, and watch so many pictures from their 
inception to their failure or success, that they 
have a very practical knowledge of what makes 
a painting good or bad, and are often able to 
help a picture in other ways than by posing 
for it. 

Indeed, most of them talk of the men for 
whom they pose as " my artists," and take a 
most personal interest in the fortunes of their 
pictures. A model is as happy as the painter 
when she can say, " I was in the New Gallery 
this year, or 
the Acad- 
emy, in 
many differ- 
ent paint- 
ings." They 
are a class 
very much 
misunder- 
stood. A girl who poses for an 
artist is not the immoral, aban- 
doned woman that the suburbs 
suppose her. She picks up some-, 
thing of an education, she learns 




76 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

something of art, she lives as interestingly, as 
usefully and as honestly as many of the people 
who condemn her. Many an artist owes his life 
to the Serafina, the Rosie, or the Brenda who, 
coming one morning to ask for a sitting, has 
found him ill and alone, with nobody to nurse 
him but an exasperated caretaker. Many a man 
has been kept out of the hospital, that dread of 
Bohemia, by the simple, kind-hearted model who 
has given up part of her working day to cooking 
his food for him, when he was too weak to do 
it himself, and then, tired after the long sittings, 
has brought her work with her, and sat down 
and sewed in his studio through the evening, 
and talked cheerful rubbish to him that has 
kept him from utter disheartenment. 

There is rich material for novelists in the 
lives of these girls. One would have liked to 
be an actress, but had not a good enough voice. 
Another would have served behind a counter, 
if some artist had not noticed her, begged her 
to allow him to paint her, and then, recom- 
mending her to his friends, shown her this way 
to a livelihood. Some have stories that read 
like penny novelettes, and, tired of oppressive 
stepmothers, or guardians, or elder sisters, have 
deliberately left their homes, and, perhaps 
knowing a few artists, have taken up this work 
so that they might have their own lives to 
themselves. Some are even supporting their 



IN THE STUDIOS 77 

mothers and younger brothers or sisters. In 
nearly all cases they come to the studios 
through the accident of meeting a discerning 
artist in the street, and to some this accident 
happens so early that they are practically 
models all their lives. One child used to come 
to read fairy stories with me, and to cut out 
paper figures (a most joyous game), who had 
posed for artists since she was three years old, 
and was now fourteen. Her mother had been 
badly treated by her father, and the little girl 
and her two elder sisters had made enough to 
keep the family without his help. All three 
were very beautiful. Both the elder ones 
married artists, and the little girl told me when 
last I saw her that, so far as she was concerned, 
she was going to marry either an artist or a 
member of Parliament. Another model had 
been a gypsy, another was a genuine trans- 
planted specimen of the rare species dairymaid 
as Izaak Walton knew it, another the runaway 
daughter of a shopkeeper in the North of 
France; the list could be made interminable. 

As for the men models, they are not so 
numerous as the girls, and less interesting. 
They are nearly all Italians, tired of organ- 
grinding or ice-cream making, or else handsome 
old soldiers, or good-looking men who have 
come down in the world. Some of them are 
picturesque enough. One morning, still in bed, 



jZ BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

in lodgings over some studios, I heard a noise 
in my workroom, and jumping up, flung open 
the door, thinking to surprise my burglar in the 
act. In the middle of the room stood a charm- 
ing old fellow, with a small knobbly head, very 
red skin, blue seafaring eyes, and a wispy white 
beard round cheeks and chin. He thought I 
was an artist, he said, and had come to see if he 
could be useful. We breakfasted, and he be- 
came talkative at once. He had been a sailor, 
had done well about the world, and had settled 
in California as a storekeeper, when he had been 
ruined by a big fire. '^ That was because I took 
Our Lord to mean insurance, when He said 
usury. It was set clear to me afterwards, but it 
was too late then, my stuff was gone." Since 
that time he had drifted, too old to pick up 
again, too proud to give in and enter the work- 
house. He had worked his way to England on 
a ship he had once commanded, and an artist 
painting shipping had met him walking about 
the docks, and told him he could make a living 
as a model. ^' And I'm doing it," he said, " and 
it's not a bad life. There's hard times, and 
there's times rough on an old man, but I'm not 
so weak yet, thanks be, and I get tidily along. 
Yes. I'll have another pipe of that tobacco. It 
isn't often you gents have the right stuff." 

But this has been a long digression from 
Serafina, the painter, and the interrupter, whom 



IN THE STUDIOS 79 

we left taking tea and discussing the pic- 
ture. 

What do they do next? Perhaps if the day- 
light has not gone, and the interrupter has not 
been thoroughly efficient, a little more work may 
be done after tea. But it is more likely that the 

painter will wash 
his brushes, and 
go up to Soho to 
dine with the in- 
terrupter, possibly 
taking Serafina 
with him, if 
she has noth- 
ing to do with 
her evening. 
Or he may go 
to one of the 
artists' clubs. 
In the old 
days there 
was no club 
i n Chelsea, 
and the art- 
ists used to 
feed and talk 
at the Six Bells Tavern, the public-house in the 
King's Road, or else at one or other of the small 
inns along the riverside. I do not think the story 
of the founding of the Chelsea Art Club, in 




8o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Church Street, has been printed before. It had 
been proposed that, as Chelsea had so long been 
associated with art, an exhibition should be held 
to illustrate the work of the principal painters 
who lived here. Meetings were held in the Six 
Bells, and a committee was appointed to report 
on the possibilities of the scheme. All the 
artists concerned met in one of the Manresa 
Road studios, with Mr. Stirling Lee, the sculp- 
tor, in the chair, to hear the result. Whistler 
and half a dozen other famous artists were there. 
The report was duly read, when someone got up 
and said that surely there was something that 
Chelsea needed more than an exhibition, and 
that was a club. " Club, club, club ! " shouted 
everybody, and the exhibition was completely 
forgotten at once, and has never been held to 
this day. A Teutonic gentleman proposed that 
they should rent a room for the club in the Pier 
Hotel, which he pronounced, after the manner 
of Hans Breitmann, "Bier." Whistler rose, in 
his most dignified, most supercilious manner. 
" Gentlemen," he said, slowly, " Gentlemen, let 
us not start our club in any beer hotel — let us 
start our club CLEAN." The result was the 
Chelsea Art Club, in a house of its own, the 
meeting place of all the Chelsea artists, and the 
centre of half the fun, the frivolity, the gossip 
of Chelsea studio life. 

Another famous artists' club is the Langham 



IN THE STUDIOS 8i 

Sketch Club, whose rooms are close behind the 
Queen's Hall. Artists meet there regularly, and 
draw and make pictures all in a room together, 
with a time limit set for the performance. At 
intervals they exhibit the harvest of their even- 
ings on the walls. They have also merry 
parties, for men only, when the doors are 
opened by fantastical figures, and scratch enter- 
tainments go on all the time, and there are songs 
and jovial recitations. Nights there are as 
merry as any, and the rooms are full of cele- 
brated men, and men about to be celebrated; 
for the club does not tolerate bunglers. 

The painter might go to one of those places; 
or else, after a supper in Soho, or m one of the 
very few little restaurants in Chelsea, he might 
spend the evening in someone else's studio, per- 
haps in the same block or buildings as his own, 
for few of the studios are isolated, and there 
are often three, five, eight, or more under a 
single roof. The studio life is almost like the 
life of a university, with its friendliness, its 
sets, and their haughty attitude towards each 

There is the set that scorns the Academy and 
all its works, whose members never cross the 
threshold of Burlington House, and smile a lit- 
tle pityingly if you mention an R.A. with any- 
thing but contempt. For them the ideals and ex- 
hibitions of the new English movement, unless 



82 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

indeed they are bold Ishmaels and have forever 
shaken the dust of exhibitions from their feet. 
Then there is the rather amusing set of people 
who laugh at the Academy, but recognise that 
it is the best picture shop in Europe, and exhibit 
there for their pocket's sake. And then there 
is the set made up largely of old Academy 
students, and of men with wives (who will, no 
matter what you say to 
them, care for material 
success), who regulate 
all their work by the 
Academy standards, beg 
advice from the R.A.'s, 
and live and 
die a hundred 
times in hope 
and despair 
between the 
sending i n 
day and the 
day of last re- 
jections from 
that most au- 
gust, most oli- 
garchic, most 
British of in- 
stitutions. 

The men of 
each set have 




IN THE STUDIOS 83 

a habit of dropping in to talk away their even- 
ings in particular studios. It is curious this: 
how one studio will be chosen without arrange- 
ment, by accident as it seems, and yet be made 
by custom so regular a rendezvous that its visi- 
tors would scarcely know what to do if they 
were asked to meet anywhere else. If you arc at 
dinner in Soho with men of one set, then after- 
wards by some natural attraction you find the 
party setting out for Brown's place; if with men 
of another set, then assuredly before the night is 
out you will be smoking a cigarette at Robin- 
son's. It is not that the man whose studio is so 
honoured is the cleverest, the leader of the set — 
he is often a mere camp-follower in whatever 
movement may be afoot. It is not even that he 
has the most comfortable rooms — one favourite 
studio is the poorest in a building, and so ill- 
furnished that if you visit it you are wise to bring 
your own chair. I do not know what the reason 
is. Some men are best in their kennels, others 
best out of them; and the atmosphere of some 
kennels is more companionable than that of 
others ; there can be nothing else. 

About nine o'clock the painter, if he has 
not gone to a club, will arrive, without particu- 
lar effort, at one of these more hospitable studios. 
Perhaps there will be a piano in a corner, with 
a man playing over its keys in the dark. An- 
other man will be looking at the prints in a book 



84 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

by the light of a candle. Perhaps there will be 
a witty little model telling stories and keeping 
everybody laughing. Perhaps there will be no 
more than a couple of friends, who no longer 
find talk necessary for intercourse, but can be 
perfectly contented in tobacco smoke and each 
other's silence. 

They will greet him when he comes with a 
question about the new picture. He will tell 
them, of course, that it is going to be a failure, 
and they will tell him not to be a fool. And 
then they will sit on, smoking, playing chess, 
singing, talking of their plans for the year, or 
the idiosyncrasies of a refractory picture buyer, 
or the abominable vanity of some stout gentle- 
man who wants to look slim in a portrait, and 
so on and so on. Late at night they will sep- 
arate, and he will go home to have a last look at 
the picture, anxiously, sleepily, holding a flick- 
ering candle; and then to sleep on the camp-bed 
in the corner of the studio, to dream of work 
and of the picture as he would like it to be, un- 
accountably more beautiful than he can make it, 
until he wakes next morning, hurries over the 
road to the cook-shop for his breakfast, and back 
again to be impatiently ready for the arrival of 
Serafina, late as usual, after the custom of her 
kind. 

And so go twenty-four hours of an artist's 
life. 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 




WILLIAM HAZLITT 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 

IONDON is full of people who keep the 
country in their hearts, and the life 
J of studios, taverns, and newspaper of- 
-^ fices is lived by many who would scorn 
the name of Londoner. One thinks himself 
a Devon man, another is a Scot, another, though 
he works in London all the year, calls the 
Lake Mountains home. It is so now; it has 
been so ever since the green fields drew away 
from London, and made town and country two 
hostile, different things. Hazlitt, talking meta- 
physically in the little tavern under Southamp- 
ton Buildings, or seated in his favourite corner 
there, with a pot of ale before him for custom's 
sake, and a newspaper before his eyes, listening 
to the vain talk of " coffee-house politicians," 
must often have congratulated himself on hav- 
ing been able to ask from his heart for " the 
clear blue sky above my head, and the green 
turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, 
and a three hours' march to dinner — and then 
to thinking." He can never have forgotten that 
he was more than the townsman, in that he had 
known the Great North Road. 

87 



88 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Borrow was another of your countrymen in 
town. You remember — when he wished to 
fight his way among the hack writers with 
"Ancient Songs of Denmark, heroic and 
romantic, with notes philological, critical, and 
historical," or " The Songs of Ap Gwilym, the 
Welsh bard, also with notes critical, philolog- 
ical, and historical " — his disconcerting inter- 
view with the publisher: 

" I am very sorry, sir," says Borrow, " to hear 
that you cannot assist me. I had hoped " 

"A losing trade, I assure you, sir; literature 
is a drug. Taggart (this to his clerk), what 
o'clock is it? " 

" Well, sir, as you cannot assist me, I will 
now take my leave; I thank you sincerely for 
your kind reception, and will trouble you no 
longer." 

" Oh, don't go. I wish to have some further 
conversation with you, and perhaps I may hit 
on some plan to benefit you. I honour merit, 
and always make a point to encourage it when 
I can; but — Taggart, go to the bank, and tell 
them to dishonour the bill twelve months after 
date for thirty pounds which becomes due 
to-morrow. I am dissatisfied with that fellow 
who wrote the fairy tales, and intend to give 
him all the trouble in my power. Make 
haste. . . ." 

I'll warrant Borrow was helped to keep his 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 89 

upper lip straight then, and afterwards, when 
he was dismally translating into German the 
publisher's own philosophical treatise, that 
proved the earth to be shaped like a pear and 
not " like an apple, as the fools of Oxford say," 
by the thought of country roads, and horses gal- 
loping, and his own stout legs that could walk 
with any in England, and his arms that could 
swing a hammer to a blacksmith's admiration. 

And what of Bampfylde in an older time, 
who was not able, like Hazlitt and Borrow, to 
see the country again and again, but came 
here from it, to live miserably, and die with its 
vision in his heart? Southey, grave, hard- 
working, respectable as he was, felt something 
of the tragedy of that countryman's irregular 
life. Through the sedate and ordered phrases 
of this letter of his to Sir Samuel Egerton 
Brydges, the vivid, unhappy life of the man 
bursts through like blood in veins. The letter 
is long, but I quote it almost in full : 

Keswick, M^y 10, 1809. 

"Sir: 

" . . . It gives me great pleasure to hear that Bamp- 
fylde's remains are to be edited. The circumstances which 
I did not mention concerning him are these. They were 
related to me by Jackson, of Exeter, and minuted down Im- 
mediately afterwards, when the Impression which they made 
upon me was warm. 

" He was the brother of Sir Charles, as you say. At the 
time when Jackson became Intimate with him he was just 



90 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

in his prime, and had no other wish than to live in solitude, 
and amuse himself with poetry and music. He lodged in a 
farmhouse near Chudleigh, and would oftentimes come to 
Exeter in a winter morning, ungloved and open-breasted, 
before Jackson was up (though he was an early riser), with 
a pocket full of music or poems, to know how he liked them. 
His relations thought this was a sad life for a man of family, 
and forced him to London. The tears ran down Jackson's 
cheeks when he told me the story. * Poor fellow,* he said, 
* there did not live a purer creature, and, if they would have 
let him alone, he might have been alive now.' 

" When he was in London, his feelings, having been forced 
out of their proper channel, took a wrong direction, and he 
soon began to suffer the punishment of debauchery. The 
Miss Palmer to whom he dedicated his Sonnets (afterwards, 
and perhaps still. Lady Inchiquin)was niece to Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. Whether Sir Joshua objected to his addresses 
on account of his irregularities in London, or on other 
grounds, I know not; but this was the commencement of 
his madness. He was refused admittance into the house; 
upon this, in a fit of half anger and half derangement, he 
broke the windows, and was (little to Sir Joshua's honour) 
sent to Newgate. Some weeks after this happened, Jackson 
went to London, and one of his first inquiries was for Bamp- 
fylde. Lady Bampfylde, his mother, said she knew little or 
nothing about him; that she had got him out of Newgate, 
and he was now in some beggarly place. 'Where?' 'In 
King Street, Holborn, she believed, but she did not know 
the number of the house.' Away went Jackson, and knocked 
at every door till he found the right. It was a truly misera- 
ble place ; the woman of the house was one of the worst class 
of women in London, She knew that Bampfylde had no 
money, and that at that time he had been three days without 
food. When Jackson saw him there was all the levity of 
madness in his manner; his shirt was ragged and black as a 
coal-heaver's, and his beard of a two months' growth. Jack- 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 91 

son sent out for food, and said he was come to breakfast with 
him; and he turned aside to a harpsichord in the room, liter- 
ally, he said, to let him gorge himself without being noticed. 
He removed him from thence, and, after giving his mother 
a severe lecture, obtained for him a decent allowance, and 
left him, when he himself quitted town, in decent lodgings, 
earnestly begging him to write. 

"But he never wrote ; the next news was that he was 
in a private madhouse, and Jackson never saw him more. 
Almost the last time they met, he showed several poems, 
among others, a ballad on the murder of David RIzzIo ; such 
a ballad! said he. He came that day to dine with Jackson, 
and was asked for copies. * I burned them,' was the reply ; 
* I wrote them to please you ; you did not seem to like them, 
so I threw them in the fire.' After twenty years' confine- 
ment he recovered his senses, but not till he was dying of 
consumption. The apothecary urged him to leave Sloane 
Street (where he had always been as kindly treated as he 
could be) and go into his own country, saying that his friends 
in Devonshire would be very glad to see him. But he hid 
his face and answered, ' No, sir ; they who knew me what 
I was, shall never see me what I am.' . . ." 

His was a different case from that of Hazlitt 
leaving Wem, of De Quincey running from 
school, or of Goldsmith setting out from Lissoy. 
It is a sad story this of the strength of the town, 
of its coarse fingers on the throat of a wild bird, 
and I should like to pretend that there are no 
Bampfyldes in Bohemia to-day who have lost 
their poetry in London, and dare not go back 
to their own country, " lest those who knew 
them what they were, should see them what they 
are." It is a terrible thing to feel ashamed in 



92 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

the presence of the hills, and fearful that the 
spring has lost its power of refreshment. 

But there are many stronger men, who have 
come to London because poetry or pictures will 
not support them in the villages they love, and 
carry a glad pride in their hearts that softens 
the blows, and eases the difficulties of the town. 
It is something as you walk disconsolate down 
a publisher's stairs, like a little boy from a whip- 
ping, to be able to pull up your despair with a 
stout breath, a toss of your head, a thought of 
the wind in your face, and the straight road over 
the moorland, with the peewits overhead; some- 
thing, when eating a hard-boiled egg at a coffee- 
stall, to remember another occasion, when in 
greater straits you were less pusillanimous, and 
tossed away your last eightpence to feed and 
sleep royally in a little village inn, ready to face 
the world with empty purse and cheerful heart 
in the sunshine of the morning. Ay, it is a great 
thing to be a countryman, to know the smell of 
the hay when a cart rolls by to Covent Garden, 
and to dream in Paternoster Row of the broad 
open road, with the yellowhammer in the hedge 
and the blackthorn showing flower. 

It is a very joyous thing for a countryman 
in town, when some small thing from the 
Happy Land breaks through the gloom or 
weariness or excitement of his irregular life, 
like a fountain in the dusk. For example, I 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 93 




have seldom been happier in Bohemia than 
when two old country songs that have, so far 
as I know, never been written down were 
sung to me in some dingy rooms over a set of 
studios by an artist's model I had never seen 
before. 

There was a yellow fog outside, and a lamp 
burned on my desk, in the ashamed manner of 
a lamp in daylight. It does not matter what 
article my brain was flogging itself to produce, 
for the article was never written. My landlady 
had brought me up some beef and fried onions 
in a soup plate, but things were altogether too 
woeful for the enjoyment of lunch, when some- 
one tapped at my door, and almost instantly a 



94 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dainty, slight girl, with a little brown felt hat 
on her head and a green cloak about her, opened 
the door and smiled at me from the threshold. 

" Do you need a model? " she asked. 

I was so glad to see anything so young and 
fresh and beautiful in the dull lamplight of 
that fog-choked room, so heartened by the 
very sight of her, that I almost forgot to 
answer, and then, in an agony of fear lest she 
should go at once, when she saw that she was 
not in a studio, explained very awkwardly 
that I was very glad she had called, that it was 
an unpleasant day, that, that .... and 
could she stop to lunch. 

She laughed, a clear country laugh, that made 
it possible for me to laugh, too ; and in a moment 
the gloom seemed to have vanished for the day, 
as she sat down as pretty as you please to share 
my beef and onions. 

We came at once to talk of the country, and, 
afterwards, when we pulled our chairs up to 
the fire, and she let me light a cigarette for her, 
she was telling me of her old life, before she 
came to London, where she lived in a little vil- 
lage in Gloucestershire. Playing with the 
cigarette in her fingers, she told me how she 
used to get up to make her brother's breakfast 
before he went out to labour on the farm, how 
before that she had been at the village school, 
and how, when they had all been children, her 




THE ARTIST'S MODEL 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 95 

old grandmother had used to sing to them every 
evening songs she had learned in her youth. 
'' Did she remember any of the songs?" I asked, 
hoping, and yet telling myself to expect no more 
than the modern jingles that have been made 
popular by print. " Why, yes, she remembered 
a few, but she could not sing as well as her old 
grandmother." And then, after a little entreaty, 
in that little dark, dusty room in Bohemia, she 
came out with this ballad in a simple, untrained 
voice that was very well suited to the words: 



Oh, it's of a fair damsel in Londin did dwell ; 
Oh, for wit and for beauty her none could excel. 
With her mistress and her master she served seven year, 
And what followed after you quickely shall hear. 



Oh, I took my box upon my head. I gained along, 
And the first one I met was a strong and able man. 
He said, " My pretty fair maid, I mean to tell you plain. 
I'll show to you a nearer road across the counterey." 

He took me by the hand, and he led me to the lane ; 
He said, " My pretty fair maid, I mean to tell you plain, 
Deliver up your money without a fear or strife. 
Or else this very moment I'll take away your life." 

The tears from my eyes like fountains they did flow. 
Oh, where shall I wander? Oh, where shall I go? 
And so while this young feller was a feeling for his knife, 
Oh, this beautiful damsel, she took away his life. 



96 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

I took my box upon my head. I gained along, 

And the next one I met was a noble gentleman. 

He said, " My pretty fair maid, where are you going so late? " 

And what was that noise that I heard at yonder gate ? 



" I fear that box upon your head to yourself does not belong. 
To your master or your mistress you have done something 

wrong ; 
To your mistress or your master you have done something ill, 
For one moment from trimbeling you really can't stand still." 

To my master or my mistress I have done nothing ill ; 

But I feel within my own dear heart it's a young man I do 

kill. 
He dem'ded my money, but I soon let him know, 
And now that able feller lies bleeding down below. 

This gentleman got off his boss to see what he had got ; 
He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some shot; 
He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some ball, 
And a knife and a whistle, more robbers for to call. 

This gentleman blew the whistle, he blew it both loud and 

shrill. 
And four more gallant robbers came trimbling down the hill. 
Oh, this gentleman shot one of them, and then most speedilee. 
Oh, this beautiful damsel, she shot the other three. 

" And now, my pretty fair maid, for what you have done, 
I'll make of you my charming bride before it is long. 
I'll make of you my own dear bride, and that very soon, 
For taking of your own dear path, and firing off a goon." 



THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 97 

It was a strange thing to hear the gentle, lazy 
melody that carried those words in the foggy 
little London room. It was the stranger to hear 
the words and the air from a girl like this one, 
who had now taken off her hat, and lay back in 
the rickety deck-chair, smoothing her tangled 
golden head, and ready for another cigarette. 
The setting was London of London: the song 
and its melody carried the very breath of the 
country into the room; the girl, an artist's model, 
smoking cigarettes, ready I have no doubt to 
compare with knowledge the merits of cherry 
brandy and benedictine, and yet as happy in 
singing that old tune as her grandmother had 
been long ago in the far-away Gloucestershire 
cottage. 

Soon after that she stood up, laughing because 
there was no mirror, to put on her little hat. I 
begged her to stay and come to dinner with me 
in Soho, but she had a business engagement, to 
pose for a pen-and-ink illustrator in the evening. 
She left me, and it was as if the blue sky had 
shown for a moment through the clouds and 
disappeared. The afternoon was foggy London 
once again, and Gloucestershire seemed distant 
as the Pole. 

In talking of countrymen and their comforts 
in town, I cannot think how I forgot to men- 
tion the consolation of a village reputation far 
away. When editors refuse your works, and 



98 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Academies decline to hang your pictures, you 
have always the reflection of the lady of the 
nursery rhyme: 

" There was a young lady of Beverley 
Whose friends said she sang very cleverly; 

* She'll win great renown 

In great London town/ 
So said the good people of Beverley. 

" But in London this lady of Bevereley 
Found all her best notes fell but heavily; 

And when this she did find, 

She said, 'Never mind, 
They still think me a songbird at Beverley.* " 

It is a reflection often made by countrymen in 
town. 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 




LoFd 



s 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 

OHO has always been a merry place. 
Even at the time when Keats wrote 
scornfully of it in a letter to Hay- 
don: 

" For who would go 

Into dark Soho, 
To chatter with dank-haired critics, 

When he might stay 

In the new-mown hay 
And startle the dappled prickets?" 

— even then there were plenty of fellows, more 
merry than critical, who sported as playfully in 
its narrow streets as ever poets did in hayfields. 
A street out of Soho Square, now so heavily 
odorous of preserved fruit, from the factory at 
the corner, was for a time the home of so re- 
doubtable a merrymaker, so sturdy a Bohemian, 
as Pierce Egan, the author of " Life in London, 
or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Haw- 
thorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian 
Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic the Oxonian, 
in their Rambles and Sprees through the 
Metropolis." A jolly book indeed, whose very 



lOl 



I02 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

pictures but Thackeray has described them 

in a manner inimitable by any clumsy, careful 
fellow : 

" First there is Jerry arriving from the 
country, in a green coat and leather gaiters, and 
being measured for a fashionable suit at Co- 
rinthian House, by Corinthian Tom's tailor. 
Then away for the career of pleasure and 
fashion. The Park! delicious excitement! The 
theatre! the saloon!! the greenroom!!! Raptu- 
rous bliss — the opera itself! and then perhaps to 
Temple Bar, to knock down a Charley there! 
There are Jerry and Tom, with their tights and 
little cocked hats, coming from the opera — very 
much as gentlemen in waiting on Royalty are 
habited now. There they are at Almack's itself, 
amidst a crowd of highbred personages, with 
the Duke of Clarence himself looking at their 
dancing. Now, strange change, they are in Tom 
Cribbs' parlour, where they don't seem to be a 
whit less at home than in fashion's gilded halls: 
and now they are at Newgate, seeing the irons 
knocked off the malefactors' legs previous to 
execution. . . . Now we haste away to mer- 
rier scenes: to Tattersall's (ah, gracious pow- 
ers! what a funny fellow that actor was who 
performed Dicky Green in that scene at the 
play!) ; and now we are at a private party, at 
which Corinthian Tom is waltzing (and very 
gracefully, too, as you must confess) with 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 103 

Corinthian Kate, whilst Bob Logic, the Ox- 
onian, is playing on the piano! " 

I can never see this giddy, rampant book with- 
out thinking of a paragraph in it, that shows us, 
through the Venetian-coloured glass of Mr. 
Egan's slang: 

" Mr. Hazlitt, in the evening, lolling at his 
ease upon one of Ben Medley's elegant couches, 
enjoying the reviving comforts of a good tinney 
(which is a fire), smacking his chaffer (which 
is his tongue) over a glass of old hock, and top- 
ping his glim (which is a candle) to a classic 
nicety, in order to throw a new light upon the 
elegant leaves of Roscoe's ^ Life of Lorenzo de 
Medici,' as a composition for a New Lecture at 
the Surrey Institution. This is also Life in 
London." 

I like to think of Hazlitt at Ben Medley's, 
who was " a well-known hero in the Sporting 
World, from his determined contest with the 
late pugilistic phenomenon, Dutch Sam." It 
is pleasant, is it not? Almost as delightful as 
that glimpse of him driving back from the great 
fight between Hickman and Neate, when " my 
friend set me up in a genteel drab great coat 
and green silk handkerchief (which I must say 
became me exceedingly)." 

Pierce Egan knew well the Bohemian life of 
his day. There is a story that is a better com- 
pliment to his spirit than his head. Some of 



I04 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

his friends lifted him, dead drunk after a 
masquerade, into a cab, put some money in his 
pocket, gave the cabby his address, and an- 
nounced that he was a foreign nobleman. Off 
drives the cabby, and finds the house, with ten 
bell-pulls, ringing to the rooms belonging to the 
different tenants. Cheerfully, as one with no- 
bility in his cab, he tugs the whole ten. From 
every window indignant night-capped heads 
deny relationship with any foreign nobleman. 
" But I've brought him from the masquerade, 
and he's got money in his pocket." Instantly 
everybody in the house runs downstairs and out 
into the street. Egan's wife recognised her 
errant husband, and, with the help of the other 
lodgers, carried him to his room. He was out 
on the spree again the following day. 

Egan was a gay fellow, wrote voluminously, 
lived vigorously, and if he did not deserve it in 
any other way, fully earned the title of a Man 
of Letters by a passage in the dedication of his 
most famous book to his Majesty George IV.: 

" Indeed, the whole chapter of ' Life in 
London ' has been so repeatedly perused by your 
Majesty, in such a variety of shapes, from the 
elegant A, the refined B, the polite C, the lively 
D, the eloquent E, the honest F, the stately G, 
the peep o' day H, the tasteful I, the manly J, 
the good K, the noble L, the stylish M, the 
brave N, the liberal O, the proud P, the long- 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 105 

headed Q, the animated R, the witty S, the flash 
T, the knowing U, the honourable V, the con- 
summate W, the funny X, the musical Y, and 
the poetical Z, that it would only be a waste of 
your Majesty's valuable time to expatiate fur- 
ther upon this subject." 

But Soho has known more lettered men than 
Egan. De Quincey, young and new to London, 
before he had lost the poor woman of the streets 
who, out of her own penury, bought port wine 
for him when he was likely to die on a doorstep 
in Soho Square, found lodging in an unfur- 
nished house in Greek Street. The ground 
floor of the house was occupied by a rascally 
lawyer, whose best quality was a devotion to 
literature that led him to shelter the boy scholar, 
or at least to allow him to sleep on the floor of 
nights with waste papers for a pillow, and an 
old horse-blanket for a covering, that he shared 
with a hunger-bitten child. 

Hazlitt rests in the graveyard of St. Anne's, 
Wardour Street, having put off the wild, 
nervous tangle of joys and miseries, hopes and 
disappointments, and violent hates, that he sum- 
marised on his death-bed as a happy life. He 
died in Frith Street. 

In Gerrard Street, Dryden lived at No. 43, 
and doubtless found it very convenient for walk- 
ing down of an afternoon to the coffee-houses 
about Covent Garden. Burke lived for a time 



io6 



BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



at No. 37, and the greatest of all clubs, The 
Club, of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds, met 
at the Turk's Head Tavern in the same street. 

There were clubs here in the early nineteenth 
century, and Thackeray described one of them 
in " The Newcomes " : " Wc 
tap at a door in an old street 
in Soho: an old maid with a 
kind, comical face opens the^ 
door, and nods 
friendly, and says, 
* How do, sir? ain't 
seen you this ever so 
long. How do, Mr. 
Noocom?' * Who's 
here?'^ 'Most every- 
body's here.' We pass 
by a little snug bar, 
in which a trim 
elderly lady is seated 
by a great fire, on 
which boils an enor- 
mous kettle ; while 
two gentlemen are 
attacking a cold sad- 
dle of mutton and 
West Indian pickles : 
hard by Mrs. Nokes the 
landlady's elbow — with 
mutual bows — we recog- 




fPr 




OLD AND NEW SOHO 107 

nise Hickson the sculptor, and Morgan, in- 
trepid Irish chieftain, chief of the reporters of 
the Morning Press newspaper. We pass through 
a passage into a back room, and are received with 
a roar of welcome from a crowd of men, almost 
invisible in the smoke." 

All the districts of London that have once 
made themselves a special atmosphere, keep it 
with extraordinary tenacity. Fleet Street is one 
example, Soho is another. The Turk's Head 
has disappeared, Thackeray's club is not to be 
found; but every Tuesday a dozen, more or less, 
of the writers of the day meet at a little res- 
taurant in the very street where Goldsmith and 
Johnson walked to meet their friends. This is 
the Mont Blanc, a very old house, whose walls 
have once been panelled. In the rooms upstairs 
the mouldings of the panels can be felt plainly 
through the canvas that has been stretched across 
them and papered to save the cost of painting. 
And all over Soho are similar small meeting 
places, where irregulars of all sorts flock to 
lunch and dine. Still, in some of the upper 
rooms of the streets where De Quincey walked 
to warm himself before sleeping on the floor, 
the student life goes on. Still in some of the 
upper windows may be seen the glitter of a 
candle-light where a scholar, probably foreign, 
pores over a book in the hours when the British 
Museum is closed to him. And in a hundred of 



io8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

the small rooms in the piles of Soho flats, small 
rooms furnished with a bed, a chair, and a table 
that also serves for a washing-stand, are there 
young actors and actresses, studying great parts 
and playing small ones, eager to be Macduff and 
content meanwhile to represent the third witch 
on the boards of a suburban theatre, copying the 
mannerisms of Miss Edna May, and keeping 
alive by smiling at the pit from the medley of 
the ballet. 

It is odd to think of the days when a shilling 
dinner was beyond achievement, when a sand- 
wich and a couple of bananas seemed a supper 
for a Shakespeare. Yet those were happy days, 
and had their luxuries. There are sandwiches 
and sandwiches. In one of the narrower streets 
that run up from Shaftesbury Avenue towards 
Oxford Street, there is a shop whose proprietor 
is an enthusiast, a facile virtuoso in their manu- 
facture. He is an amateur in the best sense, and 
no selfish, arrogant fellow who will allow none 
but himself to be men of taste. You stand in the 
middle of his shop, with all kinds of meats 
arranged on the shelves about you, a knife on 
every dish. Veal, potted liver, chicken artfully 
prepared, pate de fote gras or a substitute, 
tongue spiced and garnished, tongue potted and 
pressed, lobster paste, shrimp paste, cockle paste, 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 109 

and half a hundred other luscious delicacies, 
wait in a great circle about you, like paints on a 
palette; while you stand hesitating in the middle, 
and compose your sandwich, a touch of this, a 
taste of that, a suspicion of this, a sprinkling of 
that again, while he, at once a skilful craftsman 
and a great genius, does the rough handiwork, 
and executes your design, often, like the great 
man of the art school, contributing some little de- 
tail of his own that is needed for perfection, and 
presents you finally with the complete work of 
art, cut in four for convenient eating, for six- 
pence only, an epicurean triumph, and enough 
of it to sustain you till the morning. 

After your sandwich, you will find, in Little 
Pulteney Street, if I am not mistaken in the 
name, a man with bananas on a hand barrow, 
and likely enough an Italian woman with a red 
or green shawl about her head, turning the 
handle of a barrel-organ. With these things it 
is easy to be happy. How happy I used to be, 
walking along that street peeling and eating my 
bananas, while my heart throbbed bravely to 
the music of the organ. Sometimes a couple of 
children would be dancing in the street, as 
nautch girls might enliven the supper of an 
Indian potentate; and often someone would be 
singing the words to the barrel-organ's melodies. 
What were the favourite tunes? Ah yes : 



no BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



" Dysy, Dysy, give me yer awnser, do ; 
I'm arf cryzy all fur the love of you," 



and 



" As you walk along 

The Bar de Bullong 
With a independent air, 

You 'ear the girls declare 

There goes the millyonaire, 
The man wot broke the benk at Monte Carlo" 

Yes; those were very happy days, and you, O 
reader, lose much if the fulness of your purse, or 
the delicacy of your ear, deprives you of such an 
enjoyment. 

When your income rises beyond the content- 
ment of bananas and sandwich for dinner, or 
earlier, when the sale of a picture, or a longer 
article than usual, entitles you to a tremulous 
extravagance, you have an adventurous choice 
to make among the Soho restaurants. Every 
evening after half-past six or seven Soho takes 
on itself a new atmosphere. It is grubby and 
full of romantic memory by day. At night it is 
suddenly a successful place, where the proprie- 
tors of little restaurants are able to retire upon 
the fortunes they have made there. The streets, 
always crowded with foreigners, now suffer 
odder costumes than in daylight. Artists, poets, 
writers, actors, music-hall performers, crowd to 
the special restaurants that custom reserves for 
their use. I do not know how many small eat- 



OLD AND NEW SOHO iii 

ing-houses there are in Soho; though I set out 
once, in a flush of recklessness at the sale of a 
book, to eat my way through the lot of them; the 
plan was to dine at a different restaurant every 
night, taking street by street, until I had ex- 
hausted them all, and could retire with un- 
rivalled experience. The scheme fell through, 
partly because I fell in love with one or two 
places, so that my feet insisted on carrying me 
through their doors, when my conscience an- 
nounced that duty to the programme demanded 
a supper elsewhere, and partly because of a 
relapse into impecuniosity that compelled a 
return to the diet of bananas and sandwiches. 

Alas, that this should be a record of fact! 
What mansions of the stomach could I not 
describe, what sumptuous palaces, where wine 
and Munich lager flow from taps on every table, 
where food is as good in the mouth as in pros- 
pect, where landlords and proprietors stand 
upon their dignity, and refuse money as an 
insult to their calling. How perfectly could I 
reconstruct Soho in a gastronomic dream. Un- 
fortunately I am bound as tight to fact as to 
penury. 

The first Soho restaurant I knew was Roche's, 
now Beguinot's, in Old Compton Street. A 
lean painter took me; it was a foggy night, and 
we crossed Cambridge Circus with difficulty, 
and then, almost groping our way along the 



112 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

pavement, found the door, and stepped into the 
glamour and noise of the long room that you 
enter from the street. The painter wished to 
show me the whole place. We went right 
through to the inner room where we so often 
dined in later years, and downstairs to the hot 
little inferno, where a few brave spirits descend 
to feed and talk. The painter nodded to men in 
both rooms, and then turned to me. "This is 
Bohemia," he said; "what do you think of 
it? " We went back into the front room and sat 
down behind the long table, so that I could 
see the whole place, and observe the people who 
came in. 

Opposite our long table were half a dozen 
small ones placed along the wall, and at one of 
these sat a very splendid old man. His long 
white hair fell down over the collar of his velvet 
coat, and now and again he flung back his head, 
so that his hair all rippled in the light, and then 
he would bang his hand carefully upon the table, 
so as not to hurt it, and yet to be impressive, as 
he declaimed continually to a bored girl who sat 
opposite him, dressed in an odd mixture of 
fashion and Bohemianism. They seemed a 
queer couple to be together, until the painter 
told me that the man was one of the old set, who 
had come to the place for years, and remem- 
bered the old mad days when everyone dressed 
in a luxuriously unconventional manner, like so 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 113 

many Theophile Gautiers. The painter, who 
was a realist, referred scornfully to the old 
fellow as " a piece of jetsam left by the roman- 
tic movement." There have been such a number 
of romantic movements in the last thirty years 
that it was impossible to know what he meant. 
But the tradition is still current at the Soho 
dinner tables that there were a few grand years 
in which we rivalled the Quartier in costume, 
and outdid Montmartre in extravagant conversa- 
tion. It was pathetic to think of the old Roman- 
tic as a relic of that glorious time, alone in his 
old age, still living the life of his youth. 

All down our long table there were not two 
faces that did not seem to me then to bear the 
imprint of some peculiar genius. Some were 
assuredly painters, others journalists, some very 
obviously poets, and there were several, too, of 
those amateur irregulars, who are always either 
exasperating or charming. The painter pointed 
out man after man by name. There was So-and- 
So, the musical critic ; there was somebody else, 
who painted like Watteau: "ridiculous ass," 
commented my realistic friend; there was So- 
and-So, the editor of an art magazine; there a 
fellow who had given up art for a place in his 
father's business, but yet kept up his old 
acquaintanceships with the men more faithful 
to their ideals. 

These Soho dinners are excellently cooked 



114 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

and very cheap. Only the wine is dearer in 
England than in France. There you can get 
a carafon for a few pence, and good it is. But 
here the cheapest half-bottle is tenpence, and 
often disappointing. The wise drink beer. It 
is Charles Godfrey Leland who, in his jovial 
scrap of autobiography, ascribes all the vigour 
and jolly energy of his life to the strengthening 
effects of Brobdingnagian draughts of lager 
beer drunk under the tuition of the German stu- 
dent. It is good companionable stuff, and a 
tankard of it costs only sixpence, or less. 

In the same street with Beguinot's, a little 
nearer Piccadilly Circus, there is the Dieppe, a 
cheaper place, but very amusing. We used to 
feed there not for the sake of the food so much 
as for the pictures. Round the walls are several 
enormous paintings, some of which suggest Bot- 
ticelli's Primavera in the most ridiculous man- 
ner, only that all the figures are decently clothed 
in Early Victorian costume. It is a real joy to 
dine there, and observe them. They are the 
dearest funny pictures that I know. 

On the other side of the street is a white- 
fronted restaurant kept by a Monsieur Brice, to 
whom, through several years, I have been faith- 
ful. Night after night I have walked through 
the glitter and the dusk of the Soho streets, past 
the little tobacco shop where they sell real 
Caporal tobacco, one whiff of which transports 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 115 

you as if in an enchanted cloud to the BouP 
Mich', where the chansonniers sing their own 
ballads, to the Bal BuUier and the students' 
balls, and make you a Parisian in a moment. I 
have walked along there night after night, and 
turned in at the small side door, and through 
into the little white back room, where the best 
of waiters kept a corner table. What suppers 
have vanished in that inner room, how many 
bottles of dark Munich beer have flowed to 
their appointed havens. Here the Benns, that 
little painter and his wife, used to join us, and 
sit and talk and smoke, planning new pictures 
that were to be better than all that had been done 
before, talking over stories as yet unwritten, and 
enjoying great fame in obscurity. Here, too, 
used other friends to come, so that we often sat 
down a merry half-dozen at the table, and 
enjoyed ourselves hugely, and also other people. 
That is one of the chief merits of Soho dinners— 
the company is always entertaining. Some- 
times there would be an old philosopher at the 
table opposite, who would solemnly drink his 
half-bottle, and then smoke a cigarette over 
some modern book. One day he leaned across 
towards our table with HaeckeFs " Riddle of 
the Universe " in his hand. " Read this book, 
young people," he said; "but you should read 
it as you read Punch:' That was his introduc- 
tion to our party, and thenceforward, when he 



ii6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

had finished his meal, he would always smoke 
his cigarette with us, and, smoothing his white 
beard with a pensive hand, employ himself upon 
our instruction in philosophy. 

On other evenings ; strangers would come in, 
and we would guess their ideals from their 
manners of unfolding their napkins — the gay 
flourish meant the artist, the deliberate disen- 
tanglement the man of prose, the careless fling 
the poet, and so on — or perhaps one of our 
enigmas would join in our talk, and puzzle us 
the more. So many of the faces were far from 
ordinary, so many had the inexpressible some- 
thing in their lines that suggests an interesting 
mind. We were content to let them remain 
enigmas, and construed them each one of us to 
please himself. 

Once there was a wedding party at a longer 
table, made by joining the three small ones at 
one side of the room. The bride was a pretty 
model, the man a tousled artist; probably, we 
agreed, a very inferior craftsman, but certainly 
an excellent fellow, since he insisted on our 
joining his company, which was made up of 
others like himself, with their attendant ladies. 
He and his bride were off to Dieppe for an in- 
expensive honeymoon, so that the feast could not 
be prolonged. At half-past eight the supper 
was done, and in a procession of hansom cabs 
we drove to Victoria, and cheered them off by 



OLD AND NEW SOHO 117 

the evening boat train, the two of them leaning 
out of the window and tearfully shouting of 
their devotion to art, to each other, and to us, 
an excited heterogeneous crowd, who sang 
"Auld Lang Syne," "God Save the King," 
" The Marseillaise," and the Faust " Soldiers' 
Chorus," according to nationality, in an in- 
extricable tangle of discord. That was a great 
night. 

The Boulogne, the Mont Blanc, Pinoli's, the 
France, and many another little restaurant knew 
us in those days; there was scarcely one, from 
B rice's and the Gourmet's in the south, to the 
Venice, at the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, 
that had not suffered our merry dinner parties. 
There was not one that was not in some way or 
other linked with a memory of delight. The 
waiters, Auguste, Alphonse, Jean, le gros Paul, 
le grand Renard, all were our friends, and joked 
with us over our evil dialect and our innumer- 
able acquaintance. It was le grand Renard, 
that great man, who elaborated the jest of greet- 
ing us every time, as soon as we entered, with 
" Ah, bon soir. Messieurs. Your friend M'sieur 
So-and-So has not been here to-day, nor M'sieur 
So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur 
So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur 
So-and-So," as far as his breath would carry 
him in an incoherent string of fantastic names, 
real and invented, that delighted us every time. 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 

THE day that Casanova, travelling as 
the Chevalier de Seingalt, arrived 
in London, he strolled some little 
way from his lodging through the 
old streets of Soho, then, as now, the Italian 
quarter. Presently he says, " I saw a lot of 
people in a coffee-house, and I went in. It was 
the most ill-famed cofifee-house in London, and 
the meeting place of the scum of the Italian 
population. I had been told of it at Lyons, and 
had made up my mind never to go there; but 
chance often makes us turn to the left when we 
want to go to the right. I ordered some 
lemonade, and was drinking it, when a stranger 
who was seated near me took a news-sheet from 
his pocket, printed in Italian. He began to 
make corrections in pencil on the margin, which 
led me to suppose he was an author. I watched 
him out of curiosity, and noticed that he 
scratched out the word ancora, and wrote it at 
the side, anchora. This barbarism irritated me. 
I told him that for four centuries it had been 
written without an A. 

" ^ I agree with you,' he answered, ^ but I am 

121 



122 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

quoting Boccaccio, and in quotations one must 
be exact.' 

" ^ I humbly beg your pardon ; I see you are 
a man of letters.' 

" * A very modest one ; my name is Martinelli.' 

" ^ I know you by reputation ; you are a cousin 
of Casabigi's, who has spoken of you; I have 
read some of your satires.' 

" * May I ask to whom I have the honour of 
speaking? ' 

" ^ My name is Seingalt. Have you finished 
your edition of the " Decameron "? ' 

" * I am still working at it, and trying to get 
more subscribers.' 

" ^ Will you allow me to be of the number? ' 

" He put me down for four copies, at a guinea 
a copy, and was surprised to hear I had only 
been in London an hour. 

" ^ Let me see you home,' he said ; * you will 
lose your way else.' 

" When we were outside he told me I had been 
in the Orange Coffee-House, the most disrepu- 
table in all London. 

" * But you go.' 

" * I go because I know the company, and am 
on my guard against it.' 

" * Do you know many people here? ' 

" ^ Yes, but I only pay court to Lord Spencer. 
I work at literature, am all alone, earn enough 
for my wants. I live in furnished lodgings, I 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 123 

own twelve shirts and the clothes I stand up in, 
and I am perfectly contented.' " 

That dialogue might serve well enough for 
an exaggerated description of our own day. For 
the people of this book are willing to drink any- 
where but in the more tame and expensive 
places of the West End. They " know the com- 
pany and are on their guard against it," and go 
cheerfully where they may get most amusement 
at the smallest cost. 

The coffee-houses best loved by the Bohe- 
mians are not so disreputable as the Orange; I 
doubt if their reputations can have gone far 
beyond Soho. But they have atmospheres of 
their own; and they are not places where you 
are likely to meet anyone oppressively more 
respectable or better dressed than yourself. I 
am thinking of two small houses in particular 
— ^^The Moorish Cafe" and "The Algerian." 
Besides these there are many others, and a few 
neater, more luxurious, more expensive, that 
help to wean the Bohemian from Bohemia; and 
then there are the big drinking palaces by 
Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, where 
he goes when he needs the inspiration of a string 
band, or the interest of a crowd of men and 
women. 

Near the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, 
on the left-hand side as you walk towards Soho 
Square, is a small green-painted shop, with a 



124 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

window full of coffee cups, and pots, and 
strainers of a dozen different designs. Looking 
through the window, that is dimmed likely 
enough with steam, you may see a girl busied 
with a big coffee-grinding machine, and watch 
the hesitant blue flames of the stove on which 
the coffee is stewed. Opening the door, you 
step into a babble of voices, and find yourself 
in a tiny Moorish cafe. The room is twisted 
and narrow, so that you must have a care, as 
you walk, for other people's coffee cups upon 
the small round tables. At every table men 
will be sitting, blowing through their half- 
closed lips long jets of scented smoke that dis- 
turb continually the smoke-filled atmosphere. 
Some will be playing at cards, some at back- 
gammon, some talking eagerly among them- 
selves. Dark hair, dark eyes, sallow-skinned 
faces everywhere, here and there a low-caste 
Englishman, and sometimes, if you are lucky, 
a Bohemian in emerald corduroy, lolling 
broadly on his chair and puffing at a porcelain 
pipe. Sit down near him, and it is ten to one 
that you will be engaged in a wordy battle of 
acting, of poetry, or of pictures before the sedi- 
ment has had time to settle in your coffee. 

The coffee is thick and dark and sweet; to 
drink it alone, and to smoke with it an Eastern 
cigarette, is to hear strange Moorish melodies, 
to dream of white buildings with green-painted 




"a 
S 

X 
«o 

O 

o 

M 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 125 

porticoes, to see the card-players as gambling 
dragomans, to snatch at a coloured memory from 
the Arabian Nights. The material for the 
dream is all about you; gaudy pictures in bright 
blues and oranges hang on the walls; there is 
Stamboul in deliciously impossible perspective, 
there the tomb of the Prophet, there an Otto- 
man warship, there Noah's Ark, with a peacock 
on the topmast, a serpent peering anxiously 
from a porthole, and Noah and his family 
flaunting it in caftans and turbans on the poop ; 
from the brackets of the flickering incandescent 
lamps are hung old Moorish instruments, tar- 
boukas, and gambas, dusty, with slackened 
strings, and yet sufficient, in the dream, to send 
the tunes of the desert cities filtering through 
the thick air of the room. 

" The Algerian " is in Dean Street, close by 
the Royalty Theatre, where Coquelin played 
Cyrano de Bergerac and kept a whole party, 
French painters and English writers, quavering 
between laughter and tears, uplifted with pride 
that there could be such men as Cyrano, and 
joy that there was yet such an actor as Coquelin. 
It is on the same side of the street, a plain, square 
window, thoroughly orthodox, with " The Al- 
gerian Restaurant" written over the top. 

Behind a small counter sits Madame, knit- 
ting, smiling to all her acquaintance that come 
in, and selling neat brown packages of wonder- 



126 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

ful coffee. Beyond is an inner room, whose 
walls are covered with cocoanut matting, and 
decorated with tiny mirrors, and advertisements 
of special drinks. If you can get a corner seat 
in that crowded little room, you may be happy 
for an evening, with a succession of coffees and 
a dozen cigarettes. Sometimes there will be a 
few women watching the fun, but more often 
there will be none but men, mostly French or 
Italian, who play strange card games and laugh 
and curse at each other. There used to be a 
charming notice on the wall, which I cannot re- 
member accurately. 



ANYONE CAUGHT GAMBLING OR 
PLAYING FOR MONEY 

Will be kicked into the gutter 
and not picked up again. 

PROPRIETOR. 



It ran something like that, but it has now been 
replaced by a less suggestive placard. 

Also there used to be another room down- 
stairs, a gay companionable place, where I have 
played a penny whistle and seen some dancing 
to my music. Here we used to come after sup- 
per, to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and argue 
according to custom. Here would young 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 127 

Frenchmen bring their ladies, and talk freely 
in their own tongue. Here would we, too, bring 
our young women. It used to amuse me to notice 
the sudden hush that fell on the talk of all the 
couples and argumentative people when the 
grim Police Inspector and his important body- 
guard stumped heavily down the stairs, stood 
solemnly for a moment in the middle of the 
room, and then went slowly up the stairs again 
—and the flood of excited chatter in several lan- 
guages that followed their disappearance. 

It is impossible to leave the Algerian without 
remembering the wonderful big dog who used 
to be a visitor in the room below. He was a 
very large ruddy collie. Left to himself he was 
an easy-going fellow who would accept the hos- 
pitality of anybody who had anything to spare; 
but his master had only to say one word, and 
he would not dip his nose in the daintiest, pret- 
tiest dish of coffee in the world. He was a 
gentleman of nice manners; if his master di- 
rected his attention to any lady who happened to 
be there, and whispered in his silky ear, " Tou- 
jours la politesse," immediately, with the gravity 
of an Ambassador, he would walk across and 
lift a ceremonial paw. It is sad that the room 
is now filled with lumber that was once so gay 
with humanity. But perhaps it will be opened 
again. 

Close round the corner opposite the Algerian 



128 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

is a pretty white cafe, with a big window of 
a thousand little leaded panes, through which it 
is impossible to see. The whole suggestion of 
the outside is comfort and secluded luxury. 
And indeed so it is ; you go there when you are 
a success; or, not being one of the famous or 
opulent, when, having just sold a book or a pic- 
ture, you feel as if you were. Its air is very 
different from the friendly untidiness of the 
other two places. White cloths are on the tables, 
a little cut-glass is scattered about, and there are 
red and white flowers in silver vases — it is all 
so neat that I would not describe it, if it were 
not a favourite place of the more fortunate of 
the Bohemians, and if it had not been so sweet a 
suggestion of what might sometime be. 

I came here in the pride of my first twenty- 
guinea cheque, and was introduced with due 
ceremony to Jeanne downstairs — pretty little 
Jeanne, who says most mournfully that someone 
has told her from the lines of her hand that she 
will not be married till she is two-and-thirty — 
eleven whole years to wait. My companion was 
a literary agent, who showed me three successes, 
two novelists and a critic, out of the half-dozen 
people who were sitting at the other tables. I 
almost wished he had not brought me, until 
Jeanne came back with black coffee in tall 
straight glasses, and some excellent cigarettes, 
when I changed my mind, and thought how 



I 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 129 

often I would come here, if the world should 
turn good critic, and recognise in solid wealth 
the merit of my masterpieces. 

Across Shaftesbury Avenue, past the stage 
doors of Daly's and the Hippodrome, through 
the narrow asphalt passage that is often crowded 
with ballet girls and supers, walking up and 
down before the times of their performances at 
one or other theatre, you find your way into the 
brilliance of Leicester Square. The Alhambra 
and the Empire fill two sides of it with light, 
and Shakespeare stands on a pedestal between 
them, resting his chin on his hand in melancholy 
amazement. 

Downstairs at the corner of the Square there 
is the drinking-hall of the Provence, a long 
L-shaped room, with a band playing in a corner, 
and smaller rooms opening out of the first, and 
seeming a very multitude of little caverns from 
the repetition of the mirrors with which they 
are lined. There are frescoes on the walls of 
the larger room, of gnomes swilling beer, and 
tumbling headfirst into vats, and waving defi- 
ance at the world with all the bravado of a mug 
of ale. Fat, pot-bellied littl& brutes they are, 
and so cheerfully conceived that you would 
almost swear their artist had been a merry 
fellow, and kept a tankard on the steps of his 
ladder where he sat to paint them. 

There is always a strange crowd at this place 



I30 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

— dancers and singers from the music-halls, sad 
women pretending to be merry, coarse women 
pretending to be refined, and men of all types 
grimacing and clinking glasses with the women. 
And then there are the small groups indifferent 
to everything but the jollity and swing of the 
place, thumping their beer mugs on the table 
over some mighty point of philosophy or criti- 
cism, and ready to crack each others' heads for 
joy in the arguments of Socialism or Universal 
Peace. 

I was seated at a table here one night, ad- 
miring the picture in which a gnome pours 
some hot liquid on another gnome who lies 
shrieking in a vat, when I noticed a party of four 
men sitting at a table opposite. Three were 
obviously hangers-on of one or other of the arts, 
the sort of men who are proud of knowing an 
actor or two to speak to, and are ready to talk 
with importance of their editorial duties on the 
Draper's Compendium or the Toyshop Times. 
The fourth was different. A huge felt hat 
banged freely down over a wealth of thick black 
hair, bright blue eyes, an enormous black beard, 
a magnificent manner (now and again he would 
rise and bow profoundly, with his hat upon his 
heart, to some girls on the other side of the 
room), a way of throwing his head back when 
he drank, of thrusting it forward when he spoke, 
an air of complete abandon to the moment and 



ft 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 13 



the moment's thought; he took me tremendously. 
He seemed to be delighting his friends with im- 
promptu poetry. I did a mean but justifiable 
thing, and carried my pot of beer to a table just 
beside him, where I could see him better, and 
also hear his conversation. It was twaddle but 
such downright, spirited, splendid twaddle, 
flung out from the heart of him in a grand, care- 
less way that made me think of largesse royally 
scattered on a mob. His blue, twinkling eyes 
decided me. When, a minute or two later, he 
went out, I followed, and found him vociferat- 
ing to his gang upon the pavement. I pushed 
in, so as to exclude them, and asked him: 
"Are you prose or verse?" 
" I write verse, but I dabble in the other 
thing " It was the answer I had expected. 

"Very good. Will you come to my place to- 
morrow night at eight? Tobacco. Beer. Talk. 

" I love beer. I adore tobacco. Talking is 
my life. I will come." 

" Here is my card. Eight o'clock to-morrow. 
Good-night." And so I left him. 

He came, and it turned out that he worked 
in a bank from ten to four every day, and played 
the wild Bohemian every night. His beard was 
a disguise. He spent his evenings seeking for 
adventure, he said, and apologised to me for 
earning an honest living. He was really delight- 
ful. So are our friendships made; there is no 



132 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

difficulty about them, no diffidence; you try a 
man as you would a brand of tobacco; if you 
agree, then you are friends ; if not, why then you 
are but two blind cockchafers who have collided 
with each other in a summer night, and boom 
away again each in his own direction. 

Over the road there is the Cafe de TEurope 
where, also downstairs, there is an even larger 
drinking-hall. Huge bizarre pillars support a 
decorated ceiling, and beneath them there are a 
hundred tables, with variegated maroon-col- 
oured cloths, stained with the drippings of tank- 
ards and wine-glasses. There is a band here, too, 
in a balcony halfway up the stairs. This place, 
like all the other cafes, is not exclusively Bohe- 
mian ; we are only there on sufferance, in isolated 
parties, and it is a curious contrast to look away 
to the clerks, demimondaines, and men-about- 
town, sitting at the other tables ; faces that have 
left their illusions with their youth, faces with 
protruding lips and receding chins, weak, fool- 
ish faces with watery eyes, office boys trying to 
be men, and worn-out men trying to be boys, and 
women ridiculously dressed and painted. We 
used to go there most when we were new to 
journalism, and we found it a great place for 
planning new periodicals. Eight or nine of us 
used to meet there, and map out a paper that 
was to startle the town, and incidentally give us 
all the opportunities that the present race of mis- 



COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 133 

guided editors denied. We would select our 
politics, choose our leader-writers, and decide to 
save quarrels by sharing the dramatic criticism 
between us all. We would fight lustily over the 
title, and have a wrangle over the form. Some 
would wish to ape the Saturday Review, some 
would desire a smaller, more convenient shape 
for putting in the pocket, and others, commer- 
cially minded, would suggest a gigantic size that 
might make a good show on the bookstalls. We 
would stand lagers again and again, proud in 
the knowledge of our new appointments, leader- 
writers, editors, dramatic critics every one of 
us. And then, at last, after a whole evening of 
beer and extravagance, and happy pencilled cal- 
culations of our immediate incomes, based on a 
supposed sale of 100,000 copies weekly (we 
were sure of that at least), we would come sud- 
denly to fact. The Scotch poet, whom we 
usually elected business manager on these occa- 
sions, would smile grimly, and say, " Now, gen- 
tlemen, the matter of finance. There will be 
printers and papermakers to pay. Personally, 
and speaking for myself alone, I will give all 
that I possess." 

"And how much is that?" we would cry, al- 
though we guessed. 

" Well " — and he would make great show of 
rummaging his pockets — " it seems that I was 
cleaned right out of bullion by that last lot of 



134 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

beer. O'Rourke, it's your turn to stand. Waiter 
— ^waiter, this gentlemen wants another round of 
lagers." 

This was the invariable end, and at closing 
time, having swung from the glory of news- 
paper proprietorship to the sordid penury of 
sharing our coppers in order to pay all 'bus fares 
home, we would walk along Cranbourn Street 
to Piccadilly Circus, and separate for the night. 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 




THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 

WHERE the Charing Cross Road 
swirls up by the Hippodrome in 
a broad curve to Cambridge Cir- 
cus and Oxford Street, it drops, 
for the short space of a few hundred yards, all 
shout and merriment and boisterous! efflorescence 
of business, and becomes as sedate and proper an 
old street as ever exposed books on open stalls 
to the public fingers. The motor-'buses may rat- 
tle up the middle of the road on their rollicking 
dance to Hampstead, the horse-pulled 'buses 
may swing and roll more slowly and nearer the 
gutter; no matter, for the pavements are quiet 
with learning and book-loving. All through the 
long summer afternoons, and in the winter, when 
the lamps hang over the shelves, books old, new, 
second and third hand, lie there in rows, waiting, 
these the stout old fellows, for Elias to carry 
them off under their arms; waiting, these the lit- 
tle ones, for other true book-lovers to pop them 
in their pockets. The little brown Oxford clas- 
sics, the baby Virgil, the diminutive volumes of 
Horace and Catullus seem really to peak and 
shrivel on the shelves, suffocated in the open 

137 



138 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

air, and longing, like townsmen for the town, 
for a snug, square resting-place against the lin- 
ing of a smoking coat. All about them are in- 
numerable bound magazines, novels of Dickens, 
Scott, and Thackeray, novels of later times 
marked at half price, old sermons from sold vic- 
arage libraries, old school grammars, and here 
and there the forgotten immortals of the 'nineties, 
essays published by Mr. John Lane, and poets 
with fantastic frontispieces. Against the window 
panes, behind the books, hang prints, Aubrey 
Beardsleys now, and designs by Housman and 
Nicholson, where once would Rowlandsons 
have hung, Bartolozzis, or perhaps an engraved 
portrait of Johnson or Goldsmith, done by Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, or perhaps again a selection 
of Amazing Beauties from the " Garland " or 
the " Keepsake " or the " Offering." 

Summer and winter, book-buyers range up 
and down the street; book-buyers who mean to 
buy, book-buyers who would buy if they could, 
and book-buyers who have bought, and are now 
tormenting themselves by looking for bargains 
that they might have made, choicer than those 
they have already clinched. There is a rare joy 
in picking books from the stalls without the in- 
terference of any commercial fingers; a great 
content in turning over the pages of a book, a 
Cervantes perhaps, or a Boccaccio, or one of the 
eighteenth-century humourists, catching sight 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 139 

here and there of a remembered smile, and 
chuckling anew at the remembrance, putting the 
book down again, rather hurriedly, as if to de- 
cide once for all that you must not buy it, and 
then picking up another and repeating the per- 
formance. And then, the poignant, painful self- 
abandon when at last you are conquered, and a 
book leads you by the hand to the passionless 
little man inside the shop, and makes you pay 
him money, the symbol, mean, base, sordid in 
itself, but still the symbol, that the book has won, 
and swayed the pendulum of your emotions past 
the paying point. 

I remember the buying of my " Anatomy of 
Melancholy" (that 1 have never read, nor ever 
mean to — I dare not risk the sweetness of the 
title) ; two big, beautiful volumes, with a paper 
label on the back of each, they stood imperious 
on the shelves. I had seven-and-sixpence in the 
world, and was on my way up to Soho for din- 
ner. I took one volume down, and turned the 
thick old leaves, and ran my eye over the black 
print, broken and patterned by quotations in 
italics, Latin quotations everywhere making the 
book a mosaic in two languages. To sit and 
smoke in front of such a book would be elysium. 
I could, of course, have got a copy at a library — 
but then I did not want to read it. I wanted to 
own it, to sit in front of it with a devotional 
mind, to let my tobacco smoke be its incense, to 



I40 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

worship its magnificent name; and here it was 
in such a dress as kings and hierarchs among 
books should wear. If I were ever to have a 
Burton, this Burton would I have. I remember 
I laid the book down, and stoically lit a pipe, 
before daring to look at the flyleaf for the pen- 
cilled price. Just then another man, one with 
the air of riches, walked casually up to the stall, 
and, fearful for my prize and yet timorous of 
its cost, I seized it and turned with trembling 
fingers back to the beginning : 

" Two vols. S/-:' 

Turning my purse inside out, I went in, with 
the two volumes and the three half-crowns, to 
come to some agreement with the bookseller. 
He let me have the books, but dinner vanished 
for that night, as the meats from the table of 
Halfdan the Black, and I had to walk to Chel- 
sea. But what a joyous walk that was in the 
early autumn evening! Those two heavy vol- 
umes, one under each arm, swung me up the hill 
from Piccadilly as if they had been magic wings. 
The feel of them on my sides sent my heart beat- 
ing and my face unto smiles. One of the volumes 
was uncut — UNCUT. My landlord met me at 
the door with my bill. ^' The Devil!" my heart 
said; " I will attend to it," uttered my lips; and 
upstairs, penniless, by the light of a candle, that 
is, after all, as Elia has it, " a kindlier luminary 




A BOOKSHOP 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 141 

than sun or moon," I spent three hours cutting 
that volume, leaf by leaf, happier than can well 
be told. 

There is something more real about this style 
of buying books than about the dull mercenary 
method of a new emporium. It is good, granted, 
to look about the shelves of a new bookshop, to 
see your successful friends and the authors you 
admire outglittering each other in smart, gold- 
lettered, brilliant-coloured bindings; to pick up 
pretty little editions of your favourite books — • 
what pretty ones there are nowadays, but how 
sad it is to see a staid old folio author compelled 

to trip it in a duodecimo ; all that is pleasant 

enough, but to spend money there is a sham and 
a fraud; it is like buying groceries instead of 
buying dreams. 

And then, too, the people who buy in the 
ordinary shops are so disheartening. There is 
no spirit about them, no enthusiasm. You can- 
not sympathise with them over a disappointment 
nor smile your congratulations over a prize — 
they need neither. They are buying books for 
other people, not to read themselves. The books 
they buy are doomed, Christmas or birthday 
presents, to lie about on drawing-room tables. I 
am sorry for those people, but I am sorrier for 
the books. For a book is of its essence a talkative, 
companionable thing, or a meditative and wise; 
and think of the shackling monotony of life on 



142 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

a drawing-room table, unable to be garrulous, 
being uncut, and unable to be contemplative in 
the din of all that cackle. 

The others, who deal at the second-hand 
shops, come there of a more laudable purpose, 
to buy books for themselves — or to sell them, if 
their libraries have become insufferably fuller 
than their purses. This last case is at once sor- 
rowful and happy: sad for the heart pangs of 
playing the traitor to a book by handing it back 
to a bookseller, happy in that other people, per- 
haps you, perhaps I, have then a chance of buy- 
ing it. It is an odd thing, by the way, that 
sumptuous volumes are always easiest to part 
with; a ragged, worn old thing, especially if it 
is small, tugs at our feelings, so that we cannot 
let it go, whereas a school prize or an elegant 
present — away with it. They say that little 
women are the longest loved. It is difficult for 
us to sympathise with Lord Tyrconnel, when in 
withdrawing his patronage from Richard Sav- 
age he alleged that, " having given him a col- 
lection of valuable books stamped with my own 
arms, I had the mortification to see them in a 
short time exposed to sale upon the stalls, it be- 
ing usual with Mr. Savage, when he wanted a 
small sum, to take his books to the pawnbroker." 
How many presentation copies, in large paper 
and vellum, have not gone in a like manner? 
Though nowadays we deal direct with the book- 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 143 



seller, and do not 
soothe our con- 
sciences with the pre- 
tence of intended re- 
demption that is pos- 
sible when a pawn- 
broker receives the 
books. 

This leads me 
conveniently to an- 
other subject. Many 
young authors find 
help towards a live- 
lihood by selling the 
copies of new works 
that come to them 
for praise and blame 
from the newspapers. 
I remember, when 
first my reviewing 
began, thinking it 
unfair to their writ- 
ers thus to place books they had sent for nothing 
to the papers at once upon the second-hand stalls. 
But presently as a Christmas season came on, 
and children's books and sensational novels 
poured in in their dozens and their twenties, the 
pile in the corner of my room grew beyond all 
bearing, for I would not insult the books that 
had been purchased in their own right by giving 




144 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

them these foundling newcomers as neighbours 
on the shelves. I was driven to reasoning again, 
and soon proved, with admirable comfortable 
logic, that an advertisement, or a piece of good 
advice, from so able a pen as my own must be 
worth more to an author than the chance sale 
of a copy on the stalls. I sent immediately 
for a bookseller, and from that time on he called 
each Monday to remove the mangled corpses 
of the week before. This practice, which is 
very generally adopted and makes a pleasant 
little addition to many meagre incomes, is the 
explanation of the quantities of glowing new 
novels and other books (some of them, to the 
discredit of the reviewing profession, uncut) 
that can be seen marked down to half or a third 
the published price in almost any bookshop in 
the Charing Cross Road. It is a temptation to 
buy the books of your friends in this easy way. 
I have often hesitated over a Masefield, or a 
Thomas, and the works of half a score of little 
poets. But God deliver me from such baseness. 
These shops are not the stalls that delighted 
Lamb, and Gay before him. Those were far- 
ther east, some in Booksellers' Row, now cleared 
away by the improvements in the Strand, some 
in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, some 
close by St. Paul's, where in the alleys round 
about a few such shops may still be found. The 
City shops were those that Gay describes: 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 145 

" Volumes on shelter'd stalls expanded lie, 
And various science lures the learned eye; 
The bending shelves w^ith pond'rous scholiasts groan, 
And deep divines to modern shops unknown: 
Here, like the bee, that on industrious wing 
Collects the various odours of the spring. 
Walkers at leisure learning's flowers may spoil. 
Nor watch the wasting of the midnight oil. 
May morals snatch from Plutarch's tattered page, 
A mildew'd Bacon or Stagira's sage. 
Here saunt'ring 'prentices o'er Otway weep. 
O'er Congreve smile, or over D * * sleep.'* 

Gay, walking "with sweet content on foot, 
wrapt in his virtue and a good surtout," the first 
covering, perhaps, being scanty enough, loved 
this impecunious public so much better than his 
own more opulent patrons that he prayed to 
his publisher, Bernard Lintot, " a great sput- 
tering fellow," who must have been vastly an- 
noyed at his author's unbusinesslike fancies: 

" O Lintot, let my labours obvious lie. 
Ranged on thy stall, for every curious eye; 
So shall the poor these precepts gratis know. 
And to my verse their future safeties owe." 

Lamb loved them, too. "There is a class of 
street readers," he says, "whom I can never 
contemplate without affection — the poor gentry, 
who, not having the wherewithal to buy or hire 
a book, filch a little learning at the open stall 
—the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious 



146 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

looks at them all the while, and thinking when 
they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page 
after page, expecting every moment when he 
shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to 
deny themselves the gratification, they * snatch 
a fearful joyi' " 

Some of the older-fashioned stalls remain, 
but they are solitary. They do not sing together 
like the morning stars. They are isolated her- 
mits, often in strange surroundings. In the open 
markets held in the shabbier streets, where flar- 
ing naphtha lights swing over barrows like 
those set up once a week in the squares of little 
country towns, I have often stood in the jostling 
crowd of marketers, to turn over old, greasy, 
tattered covers. There is an aloofness about the 
bookstall even there, where it stands in line with 
a load of brussels sprouts and cabbages on one 
side, and a man selling mussels and whelks on 
the other. The bookstall, even in its untidiness, 
has always the air of the gentleman of the three, 
come down in the world, perhaps, but still one 
of a great family. I have sometimes been 
tempted to alopogise to the bookseller for tak- 
ing a penn'orth of cockles and vinegar while 
looking at his books. It seemed etiquette not 
to perceive that grosser, less intellectual stalls 
existed. 

There are similar book barrows in the market 
streets of the East End, and some in Earring- 



THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 147 

don Street, where I have heard of bargains 
picked up for a song. But I have never visited 
them. There are good second-hand shops up 
the Edgeware Road, and I got Thorpe's 
" Northern Mythology " for threepence in 
Praed Street. But my favourite of all the iso- 
lated shops is a queer little place at the dip of 
Bedford Street, where it drops into the Strand. 
It has but a lean row of books ranged on a nar- 
row table in front of the window, but its prints 
are superb. There are maps sometimes, and 
often old hand-coloured caricatures, figures 
with balloons full of jokes blowing from their 
mouths, hanging behind the glass or fluttering 
in the doorway. And, though the books are 
so few, I seldom pass the shop without seeing 
office boys from the Bedford Street or Henrietta 
Street oflEices skimming through them, now look- 
ing at one, now at another, until their tardy 
consciences hurry them at last upon their mas- 
ters' errands. 

Still, if we except Paternoster Row, mainly 
occupied by publishers, the Charing Cross Road 
is the only street whose character is wholly book- 
ish. By these shops alone are there always a 
crowd of true bookmen. There are the clerks 
who bolt their lunches to be able to spend half 
an hour in glancing over books. There are 
reviewers selling newspaper copies. There are 
book-collectors watching for the one chance in 



148 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

ten thousand that brings a prize into the four- 
penny box. There are book-lovers looking for 
the more frequent chance that brings them a 
good book at a little price, or lets them read it 
without buying it. 

I have met old ladies there, with spectacles, 
and little bonnets with purple ribbons, eating 
buns before going back to the Museum to read, 
scanning over the bookshelves, like birds peck- 
ing for crumbs over the cobbles. And some- 
times I have met really old ladies, like Mrs. 

, who told me she had sat on Leigh Hunt's 

knee, and put strawberries into his mouth; old 
ladies who remember the old days, and the old 
bookshops, and come now to the Charing Cross 
Road for old sake's sake, just as a man reads 
over again a book that he read in his childhood 
for that reason alone. There was an old gen- 
tleman, too, whom I loved to see striding across 
the street from shop to shop, dodging the 'buses 
as he crossed, with a long grey beard that di- 
vided at his chin and blew over his shoulders, 
and a huge coat, all brown fur without, that 
flapped about his legs. There was another, too, 
with a white forehead and an absent eye, and 
thin black clothes with pockets bagged out by 
carrying libraries. I caught him once looking 
at a book upside down, deep in some dream or 
other: he came to himself suddenly, and saw 
that he had been observed — I loved him for 




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BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 149 

the shamefaced, awkward way in which he 
tried to pretend he had been looking at a mark 
on the page. Then, too, there are young serious- 
faced poets, with, who knows how many great 
works, ready planned, floating in the air about 
their heads : it is pleasant to watch the super- 
cilious scorn with which they pass the shelves 
of lighter literature. It is delightful, too, to 
see the learned young men from the country 
trying to hoodwink the bookseller, who really 
does not care, into thinking that they are of the 
connoisseurs, and, in the know, by asking him 
with a particular air about special editions of 
Oscar Wilde, and who has the best collection 
of Beardsley drawings. 

Nor must I forget the true Tom Folios, who 
are " universal scholars as far as the title-pages 
of all authors, know the manuscripts in which 
they were discovered, the editions through which 
they have passed, with the praises or censures 
which they have received from the several 
members of the learned world. They think 
they give you on account of an author when 
they tell you the subject he treats of, the name 
of the editor, and the year in which it was 
printed." We have several such about the Brit- 
ish Museum, and often they may be seen in the 
Charing Cross Road, picking over the older 
books, glancing at the title-pages (if by any 
chance you catch them looking at the text, be 



I50 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

assured they are only examining the print). 
Some of them are useful fellows, like one I 
know, who, when he is in drink and merry, can 
give you a list of the half-dozen best works on 
any subject you like to mention, with the libra- 
ries or bookshops where they may be found. 

All these characters may be met by the book- 
stalls. Surely among the lot of them the books 
on those shelves have a better chance of finding 
their proper owners, the readers planned for 
them from their creation, than in any of the 
glass-fronted shops where the customers are ha- 
rassed by extravagantly dressed young men, who 
assume, and usually rightly, that they know bet- 
ter what is wanted than the customers do them- 
selves. 

Indeed, I am quite with Gay in the matter. 
I would be happier to think of this book tat- 
tered and torn in a twopenny box, than lying 
neat and uncut upon a drawing-room table. 
Therefore, O my publishers, though I can- 
not address you in neat verse like Mr. Gay's, 
let me pray you in plain, honest prose — do send 
out a superabundance of copies to the newspa- 
pers, so that some, at least, may find their ig- 
nominious, happy way to the best and untidiest 
bookshops in the world. 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 







OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 

JOHNSON and BoswcU walked once in 
Greenwich Park, then very decent coun- 
try, and even now no despicable imitation. 
" Is not this fine? " says the Doctor; Bos- 
well answers, "Yes, sir; but not equal to Fleet 
Street"; and the Doctor clinches the matter 
with, " You are right, sir, you are right." 

Indeed, Fleet Street, brave show as it is to- 
day, must have been splendid then, seen through 
old Temple Bar, a turning, narrow thorough- 
fare, with high-gabled houses a little overhang- 
ing the pavements, those pavements where 
crowds of gentlemen, frizzed and wigged, in 
coloured coats and knee-breeches, went to and 
fro about their business. There would come 
strutting little Goldsmith in the plum-coloured 
suit, and the sword so big that it seemed a pin 
and he a fly upon it. There would be Johnson, 
rolling in his gait, his vast stomach swinging 
before him, his huge laugh bellying out in the 
narrow street, with Boswell at his side, leaning 
round to see his face, and catch each word as 
it fell from his lips. There would be Doctor 

153 



154 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Kenrick, Goldsmith's arch enemy, for whose 
fault he broke a stick over the back of Bookseller 
Evans, and got a pummelling for his pains. 
There would be the usual mob of young fellows 
trying as gaily then as now to keep head above 
water by writing for the Press. 

And then think of it in a later time, when 
Hazlitt walked those pavements, with straight, 
well-meant strides, as befits a man who has done 
his thirty miles a day along the Great North 
Road. Perhaps, as he walked, he would be 
composing his remarks on the oratory of the 
House of Commons, which he was engaged to 
report for Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle. 
Or perhaps, if it were Wednesday, he would 
turn in at Mitre Court, or meet a slim-legged, 
black-clothed figure with a beautiful head, 
Charles Lamb, coming out of the archway, or 
hurrying in there, with a folio under his arm, 
fresh from the stall of the second-hand book- 
seller. Perhaps Lamb might be playing the 
journalist himself, writing jokes for Dan Stu- 
art of the Morning Post, You remember: 
" Somebody has said that to swallow six cross- 
buns daily, consecutively, for a fortnight would 
surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to 
furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a 
fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we 
were constrained to do, was a little harder ex- 
action." Or, perhaps, you might meet Cole- 




DOCTOR JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 155 

ridge coming that way from his uncomfortable 
lodging in the office of the Courier up the 
Strand. Coleridge knew the ills of journalistic 
life. De Quincey " called on him daily and 
pitied his forlorn condition," and left us a de- 
scription of his lodging. De Quincey had 
known worse himself, but this was evil enough. 
" There was no bell in the room, which for many 
months answered the double purpose of bed- 
room and sitting-room. Consequently I often 
saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, 
surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon 
handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics down 
three or four flights of stairs to a certain ' Mrs. 
Brainb ridge,' his sole attendant, whose dwelling 
was in the subterranean regions of the house. 
There did I often see the philosopher, with the 
most lugubrious of faces, invoking with all his 
might this uncouth name of * Brainb ridge,' each 
syllable of which he intonated with long-drawn 
emphasis, in order to overpower the hostile hub- 
bub coming downwards from the creaking press 
and the roar from the Strand which entered at 
all the front windows." 

And then there was the Tom and Jerry time, 
when young bloods, for sport, came down at 
night to Temple Bar to overturn the boxes of 
the watchmen and startle their rheumatic oc- 
cupants; when Reynolds would leave his insur- 
ance office to go to Jack Randall's in Chancery 



156 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Lane to watch the sparring; when Pierce Egan, 
the first and greatest of sporting writers, would 
slip along the Strand from Soho for the same 
splendid purpose. 

And then there was the time when Dickens, 
a very young Bohemian, saw his first sketch, 
" called ^ Mr. Minns and his Cousin ' — dropped 
stealthly one evening at twilight, with fear and 
trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark office 
up a dark court in Fleet Street — appear in all 
the glory of print." 

And then, long before, there had been the 
magical Elizabethan Fleet Street, when Ben 
Jonson and his friends drank by Temple Bar, 
when Shakespeare met Falstaff and Pistol in 
the Fleet Street taverns, and was probably con- 
temptuously cut by poor Greene, as " an up- 
start crow, beautified with our feathers, a 
puppet speaking from our mouths, an antick 
garnisht in our colours." 

And now there are all these different Fleet 
Streets, one on the top of the other, dovetailed 
together indistinguishably. A building here, an 
old doorway there, the name of a side street, 
brings back a memory of one age or another. 
This tavern, for example, was given its name 
as a jest by a gay-dressed fellow in long locks, 
with a sword swinging at his side. There is 
the street of the White Frairs. That building 
was designed by a subject of Queen Anne. 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 157 




Lamb walked past while those offices were still 
cradled in their scaffolding. 

On a sunny morning there is no jollier sight 
in all the world than to look down Fleet Street, 
from a little below the corner of Fetter Lane 
on that side of the road. The thoroughfare is 
thronged with 'buses — green for Whitechapel, 
blue going to Waterloo Bridge, white for Liver- 
pool Street, gay old survivals of the coaching 
days with their drivers windblown and cheer- 
fully discontented, the healthiest-looking fel- 
lows, who would once have driven four-in-hand, 
and are too soon to vanish, and be replaced by 
uniformed chauffeurs. Already the great mo- 
tor-'buses whirl past them down the narrow 
street, and dwarf them by their size. There 
goes a scarlet mail waggon, there a big dark 
van from some publishers up Paternoster Row. 



158 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Barrows creep along the gutter, some selling 
chocolates " for an advertisement," at a penny 
a stick, some selling bananas, ''two for lid.," 
the penny written big, and the halfpenny as 
small and apparently insignificant as is consis- 
tent with street-selling honesty. The toot-toot 
of a motor bicycle worries among the other 
noises like the yap of a terrier, and a boy swings 
past, round the backs of the 'buses, twisting his 
way under the horses' noses with devilish enjoy- 
ment, a huge sack of newspapers fastened on his 
back. 

On either side, above all the flood of traffic, 
stand the tall, narrow houses, and the larger, 
newer buildings, with the names of newspapers 
and magazines blazoned in brilliant gold and 
colour across wall and window. The sunlight, 
falling across the street, leaves one side in 
shadow, and lights the other with a vivid glare, 
as if to make the shadowed side as jealous as 
it can. Men and women hurry on the pave- 
ments; typewriter girls, office boys, news edi- 
tors, reporters, writers, and artists in pen and 
ink jostling each other down the street. And if 
you look up from the noise and movement, you 
see the grey dome of St. Paul's, standing aloof, 
immutable, at the top of Ludgate Hill. How 
many times has the sun shone on that great pile 
of stone, how many lives have been hurried 
through within sight of its majesty and calm! 




FLEET STREET 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 159 

How many men yet will untidily live out their 
days, harassed, nervous, never giving a moment 
but to the moment itself, while that massive 
building rises, as if in the sky, a monument of 
peace above the tumult! 

As you watch the people on the pavements 
you will gradually learn to distinguish by their 
manner of walking the men who pass you by. 
There are the young fellows who walk as hard 
as if the world depended on the rapid accom- 
plishment of their business; these are the men 
who do not matter, who seek to hide their un- 
importance from themselves. The real editor 
of a successful paper walks with less show of 
haste, an easier tread, a less undignified scram- 
ble. He knows the time he may allow, and is 
never in a hurry. It is his subordinates, the 
fledglings of the Press, and the editors of small, 
unsuccessful rags, who are always, as we north 
countrymen say, in a scrow. Poor fellows! 
Fleet Street life is so heartless, so continuous — 
they must do something, or it would not know 
that they are there. 

Then there are the writers and illustrators, 
men of less regular stamp, men whom it is diffi- 
cult to imagine sitting at an office desk, men 
who walk a lazy kind of essay, with all manner 
of digressions. These are the unattached, the 
free lances, who know that the papers for which 
they write cannot do without them (it is extraor- 



i6o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dinary, though, how soon the feat is accom- 
plished if they happen to die) , and in that proud 
knowledge saunter down to shake the editors by 
the hand, and ask what is to be the game this 
week, or to suggest some topic of their own. 
There will be Chesterton, Ursa Major Rediv- 
ivus, rolling, with an armful of papers, from 
side to side of the pavement, cannoning from 
astounded little man into astounded little man, 
and chuckling all the time at one or other of 
the half-dozen articles that he is making inside 
that monstrous head. There will be Bart Ken- 
nedy, a massive, large-built fellow, walking the 
pavement with the air prescribed by the best of 
drill sergeants, " as if one side of the street be- 
longed to him, and he expected the other 
shortly." There will be the critic from the 
country, striding down Bouverie Street to see 
what impertinent poets have dared to send their 
books to his paper for review. There a little 
dark-faced writer of short stories, an opulent 
manufacturer of serial tales, a sad-looking 
maker of humorous sketches, and a dexterous 
twister of political jokes into the elaborate 
French metres that make a plain statement look 
funny. There will be twenty more. 

As you walk down the street you realise how 
impossible it is to throw off the consciousness 
of its ancient history. Over the way is Mitre 
Court, where Lamb's friends met on Wednes- 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 16 1 



days, and discussed " Of Persons One would 
wish to have Seen." How impossible it was 
even then appears from the fact that Chaucer's 
name was suggested to the Mitre Courtiers by 




someone asking whether they could 
not " see from the window the Tem- 
ple Walk in which old Chaucer used to take his 
exercise." 

Farther down there is an alley-way leading 
to Salisbury Court, where Richardson ran his 
printing business, and built the house that his 
wife did not like, and wrote his interminable 
books. In the alley-way is the tavern where, at 
the present day, the Antient Society of Cogers 
meet to discuss the world and its affairs. They 
used to meet at the Green Dragon round the 
corner, in Fleet Street again. 

Farther up, at the top of the street, close by 
Temple Bar, there is the Cock, an admirable 
place, where you are still fed in high-backed 
pews and served by English waiters. Tennyson 



i62 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

was so delighted by one of them that he wrote 
'^ Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," from 
which I filch some livening verses : 

Oh, plump headwalter at the Cock, 

To which I most resort, 
How goes the time? 'Tis five o*clock, 

Go fetch a pint of port. 
And let it not be such as that 

You set before chance comers, 
But such whose father grape grew fat 

On Lusitanian summers* 

The Muse, the jolly Muse it is I 

She answered to my call, 
She changes with that mood or this, 

Is all in all to all: 
She lit the spark within my throat, 

To make my blood run quicker, 
Used all her fiery will, and smote 

Her life into the liquor. 

And hence this halo lives about 

The waiter's hands, that reach 
To each his perfect pint of stout, 

His proper chop to each. 
He looks not like the common breed 

That with the napkin dally ; 
I think he came, like Ganymede, 

From some delightful valley. 

The Cock was of a larger egg 

Than modern poultry drop, 
Step'd forward on a firmer leg, 

And cram'd a plumper crop; 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 163 

Upon an ampler dunghill trod, 

Crow'd lustier late and early, 
SIpt wine from silver, praising God, 

And raked In golden barley. 

A private life v^as all his joy, 

Till in a court he saw 
A somethlng-pottle-bodled boy 

That knuckled at the taw ; 
He stoop'd and clutch'd him, fair and good, 

Flew over roof and casement; 
His brothers of the weather stood 

Stock still for sheer amazement. 

But he, by farmstead, thorpe, and spire, 

And follow'd with acclaims, 
A sign to many a staring shire 

Came crowning over Thames. 
Right down by smoky Paul's they bore, 

Till, where the street grows straiter. 
One fix'd for ever at the door. 

And one became headwaiter. 

It reads as if he had enjoyed the place. The 
Cock is still above the door, and it is not im- 
possible to believe that these waiters, like that 
one, were brought in a manner of their own 
from some hidden valley where the napkin is 
the laurel of ambition, where men are born 
waiters, as others are born priests or kings. 

Pepys loved the Cock: "eat a lobster here, 
and sang and was mighty merry." Johnson 
knew it, too. The tavern has been rebuilt, 
though all the old fittings are retained, and 



1 64 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

every day from half-past twelve till three its 
dark, square pews are full of talking, feeding 
men, as in the older days. 

Far down on the Fetter Lane side of the street 
there is the Cheshire Cheese, still the dirty- 
fronted, low-browed tavern, with stone flasks 
in the window, that it was even before Johnson's 
time. Here, so people say, Johnson and Gold- 
smith used to sup and be merry with their 
friends. Perhaps it was the haunt of one of 
the talking clubs of which neither of them was 
ever tired. Although it is nowhere written that 
Johnson crossed the threshold, it is very unlikely 
that the man who asserted that " a tavern chair 
was the throne of human felicity" could have 
neglected such an opportunity as was his. For 
he lived for some time in Wine Office Court, in 
whose narrow passage is the entrance to the 
tavern, and I doubt if he could have passed it 
every day without finding some reason for en- 
couraging it. Indeed, with Macaulayic logic, 
they show you Johnson's corner seat, the wall 
behind it rubbed smooth by the broadcloth of 
innumerable visitors, " to witness if they lie." 
It is a pleasant brown room, this, in the tavern, 
with Johnson's portrait hanging on the wall, 
old wooden benches beside good solid tables, 
and a homely smell of ale and toasted cheese. 
Here many of the best-known journalists make 
a practice of dining, and doubtless get some 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 165 

sauce of amusement with their meat from the 
young men and girls, literary and pictorial, 
destined to work for the cheap magazines and 
fashion papers, who always begin their profes- 
sional career by visiting the Cheshire Cheese 
for inspiration. Up a winding, crooked, dark 
staircase there are other rooms, with long tables 
in them stained with wine and ale, and in one 
of them the Rhymers' Club used to meet, to 
drink from tankards, smoke clay pipes, and re- 
cite their own poetry. 

In the passage into Wine Office Court, almost 
opposite the narrow entry of the Cheshire 
Cheese, there is a door set back, that denies 
admittance (in big printed letters) to all but 
members of the Press Club. This is a sort of 
substitute for the coffee-houses of the eighteenth 
century. Goldsmith used to gather suggestions 
for the Bee at "The Temple Exchange Coffee 
House near Temple Bar"; and in the fourth 
number of that ill-fated periodical he confessed 
that he was tempted: 

" To throw off all connexions with taste, and 
fairly address my countrymen in the same en- 
gaging style and manner with other periodical 
pamphlets, much more in vogue than probably 
mine shall ever be. To effect this, I had thought 
of changing the title into that of The Royal 
Bee, The Anti-Gallic an Bee, or The Bee's 
Magazine, I had laid in a stock of popular 



1 66 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

topics, such as encomiums on the King of Prus- 
sia, invective against the Queen of Hungary 
and the French, the necessity of a militia, our 
undoubted sovereignty of the seas, reflections 
upon the present state of affairs, a dissertation 
upon liberty, some seasonable thoughts upon the 
intended bridge of Blackfrairs, and an address 
to Britons; the history of an old woman w^hose 
teeth grew three inches long, an ode upon our 
victories, a rebus, an acrostic upon Miss Peggy 
P., and a journal of the weather. All this, to- 
gether with four extraordinary pages of letter- 
press, a beautiful map of England, and two 
prints curiously coloured from nature, I fancied 
might touch their very souls." 

Reading that is like listening to plans laid 
down a hundred times a year in the Press Club 
smoking-room. There are the members, their 
legs hung elegantly over the backs of chairs, 
cigars, briars, or meerschaums between their 
teeth, glasses of whisky on the small round 
tables at their sides, planning their baits for 
the British public, much as anglers observe the 
sky, and decide between the likely merits of dif- 
ferent artificial flies. The prints " curiously 
coloured from nature " have still their votaries. 
"A good three-colour plate, that's the very 
thing" — I can hear the tones of the conspira- 
tor's voice. Reverse Goldsmith's popular poli- 
tics, abuse Germany, fling in a black-and-white 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 167 

cartoon of a fat John Bull kissing a short-skirted 
French demoiselle, with a poem about the en- 
tente cordiale, substitute Labour Party for lib- 
erty — the picture is the life. 

The Press Club is a great manufactory of 
comfortable fame. It hangs caricatures of its 
members round its walls. A man who sees his 
own caricature has a foretaste of immortality, 
and of this flattery the Club is generous to itself. 
And you cannot ask a member what such a one 
of his fellows does without being made to feel 
ashamed of your ignorance of his celebrity. 
With a cold shock you learn that you have fallen 
behind the times, and that men are famous now 
of whom you never heard. 

As well as the Press Restaurant, and the more 
noted taverns, there are plenty of places up and 
down the street where famous men can get their 
beef and beer like ordinary people, but the most 
entertaining places of refreshment are two small 
cafes that are exactly similar to many in other 
parts of the town. At the top of Bouverie Street 
there is a little white-painted, gold-lettered 
shop, with cakes and pastries in the window. 
You go in there, and find rows of chocolate- 
coloured marble table-tops, standing on 
moulded iron legs, and surrounded by cheap 
wooden chairs. There are mirrors on all the 
walls, which are hung with notices that tell of 
the price of Bovril by the cup, or the cost of a 



1 68 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

pound packet of special coffee. Girls, dressed 
in black, with peaked white caps and spotless 
aprons, scuttle about with trays, and cloths to 
mop up the tea which previous customers have 
spilt. You may go downstairs into a yellow 
atmosphere of smoke and electric light, and find 
another room, full of tables like the first, where 
crowds of young men are drinking tea and play- 
ing chess. If you sit down here, and ask know- 
ingly to have the moisture wiped off before you 
lay your book on the table, and then have but- 
tered toast and tea brought you by the white- 
capped girl, and finally throw the food into 
yourself, as if by accident, while you read your 
book; if you do all these things as if you were 
born to it, why then you may feel yourself the 
equal of any journalist in the place. 

The other little cafe is on the opposite side of 
the street, close by Fetter Lane. A green, elab- 
orately fronted shop, it is slightly more expen- 
sive than the first, and more luxurious. The 
tables hide their innocence under white cloths, 
and you are not given the satisfaction of watch- 
ing the swabbing up of the last customer's tea. 
There is a string band playing in a recess. If 
you wish to see real live journalists, you may see 
them here drinking black coffee out of little 
cups in the mildest possible manner. 

This chapter is long already, and a little un- 
ruly in digression, but I cannot conclude it with- 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 169 

out mentioning one of the innumerable talking 
clubs that meet at the taverns in the neighbour- 
hood, just as Goldsmith's friends used to meet 
on Wednesdays at the Globe, and for the same 
purpose. I was introduced to it soon after 
coming into Bohemia. There was a long table 
down the middle of the room, and round it, on 
benches, were seated about a dozen men, some 
young, some very young, few over thirty, with 
beer mugs and spirit glasses before them, and 
pipes in their mouths. The room already 
reeked of the good, dirty, homely smell of to- 
bacco smoke, although they had but just assem- 
bled. There was a big cigar-box at one end of 
the table, into which each member dropped a 
coin representing the amount of liquor he ex- 
pected to drink during the evening, and the 
amount he thought fitting for any guest he had 
happened to bring. A huge snuff-box was passed 
round at intervals. All the members took 
pinches, and sneezed immediately afterwards, 
with apparent enjoyment. There was a fierce 
argument in progress when we came in. One 
of the members had just published a book, and 
the others were attacking his as healthy wolves 
worry a lame one. "What do you mean 
by this in the chapter on Swinburne?" — "I 
think you're a little mistaken in saying this 
about Raphael "— " Swinburne has ceased to 
count anyway"— "Who dared say that Swin- 



170 



BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



burne has ceased to count? " — " Swinburne's 
poetry will last as long as Victor Hugo's, and 
Hugo is the greatest of the nineteenth century " 
— " Hugo, pfal a meteor flash, no more . . . 




a careless fellow . . . But the question of 
French poetry is interesting enough " — " Ah I 
French poetry ..." Half the company turned 
on the last speaker, and the poor author, who 
had been waiting to answer his critics, took a 
drink of beer, filled his pipe, and smiled to him- 
self. French poetry as matter for discussion led 
them to Villon, and from Villon they passed to 



OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 171 

the question of capital punishment for trivial 
offences, and from that to the question whether 
capital punishment is justifiable at all. At this 
there was a cry of faddism, which introduced an 
argument about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The even- 
ing, typical of many others in Fleet Street, 
passed like magic, as the talk swung from sub- 
ject to subject, and the tankards were emptied 
and refilled, and the snuff-box made its rounds. 



SOME NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 




SOME NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 

I MENTIONED a little newspaper that, 
by its payments for my young essays and 
exuberantly juvenile reviews, made it pos- 
sible for me to adventure by myself and 
take my first lodging in Chelsea. It was a good 
example of those obscure, high-hearted little 
rags that keep alive so many of the unknown 
writers, and help so many youthful critics to 
deceive themselves into self-congratulation at 
the sight of their own names in capital letters. 
Your name in capital letters at the foot of a 
review seems as permanent, as considerable a 
memorial as the dome of St. Paul's. It is impos- 
sible to imagine it forgotten. Indeed, there have 
been plenty of people surprised by their first 
glad printed outbursts into contented silence for 
the rest of their lives. For them, their domgs 
have been forever consecrated from those of the 
herd by the memory of that great Saturday long 
ago when their names flaunted it upon a Fleet 
Street poster. Their air of "having been 
through all that " is very delightful. 
The little paper was published once a week 
175 



176 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

as an organ of sane Liberal opinion and enlight- 
ened criticism (I quote from memory of its pros- 
pectus). It had offices and a brass doorplate 
in a street off the eastern end of the Strand. 
Well I remember the thrill of passing that door- 
plate as a regular contributor. Surely, surely, 
I thought, all the street must know that I was I, 
the I whose articles were, well, not the best in 
the paper, but certainly among the pleasantest. 
I used to glance both ways along the pavement 
before plunging in on Tuesday afternoon to 
learn, as a privileged counsellor, what we were 
to announce to the world on the following Sat- 
urday. 

Up three pair of stairs I used to stamp, quite 
noisily, perhaps with half an idea of further 
establishing my self-confidence; for always, in 
those early days, I nursed a secret fear that each 
article would be the last, that on the next Tues- 
day the editor would frown upon my sugges- 
tions, and firmly dismiss me from his employ. 

How groundless was my fear! This editor 
could never have brought himself to dismiss 
anyone. When he engaged new contributors, 
instead of dismissing the old, he used to swell 
the paper to make room for them, without, alas! 
increasing the circulation. It grew from eight 
to twelve pages, from twelve to sixteen, from 
sixteen, with a triumphant announcement on its 
solitary poster, that was pasted by the editor 




THE EDITOR 



- \ 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 177 

himself, when nobody was looking, on a hoard- 
ing outside the office, to a magnificent twenty. 
There it rested; not because its editor had grown 
flint of heart, but because he had grown light of 
purse, and been compelled to cede the publi- 
cation to another. 

He was the most charming editor I ever met. 
A little out of breath after the three pairs of 
stairs, I would swing through the long attic that 
was piled waist-high with the past issues of the 
moribund little periodical, through the " ante- 
room," a small, scrubby hole partitioned from 
the attic, and furnished with an old cane-bot- 
tomed chair for the use of visitors, to be greeted 
by a glad and boyish shout from the chief him- 
self. An eager-faced, visionary little man, he 
lolled in an expensive swing chair before an 
expensive roll-top desk, both obviously bought 
in the first flush of editorial dignity. A ciga- 
rette in a patent holder stuck jauntily between 
his teeth, and a pile of white, unwritten paper 
stood before him on his blotting pad. It was 
delightful to see the unaffected joy of him^ at 
the excuse my arrival afforded him for talking 
instead of writing. 

"Was he busy?" I would mischievously ask. 
" Had I not better disturb him another time? " 

"Yes, he was busy, always busy; but," and 
here he would hurriedly scuffle all his papers 
into the back of the desk, and close his fountain 



178 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

pen, " he held it the first duty of an editor to 
be ready to listen to the ideas of his contrib- 
utors"; and then, dear fellow, he would talk 
without stopping until, after perhaps a couple 
of hours of wide, of philanthropic conversation, 
in which he took all sides and argued all opin- 
ions with equal skill, I would venture to intro- 
duce, as a little thing that scarce deserved a place 
in such a talk, the subject of work and the week's 
issue of the paper. He would sober instantly 
and sadly, like a spaniel checked in mid career. 
*^ Well, what is it you want to write? An article 
on prettiness in literature. Do it, my good chap, 
do it. I concur heartily in all your views. Pret- 
tiness in literature is an insipid, an effeminate, 
a damnable, despicable thing. Oh! — I see — you 
intend rather to show its merits. Yes, yes; very 
true indeed. He would surely be a mean-souled 
creature who would ask for a coarser dish. Pret- 
tiness in literature, delicacy, daintiness, poetry, 
the very flower of our age, the whitebait of the 
literary dinner! Certainly, young man, cer- 
tainly; a column and a half, by all means." And 
then, after I had asked for and obtained a few 
books for review (classics if possible, for they 
were at the same time education and a source of 
profit), he would rattle off again into his flow- 
ery talk of the reformation of the world, that 
must take its beginning in the heart of man, of 
a scheme for workingmen's clubs, of a project 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 179 

for turning Socialists into sane Liberals, such as 
would be regular buyers of the little paper, and 
so on, and so on, ending up always with the same 
exhortation : " My dear young fellow, do smoke 
cigarettes instead of that dirty cesspot of a pipe. 
Consider: with a cigarette you destroy your in- 
strument, the paper tube, with each enjoyment. 
Whereas with the thing you smoke, you use it 
until it is saturated with iniquity and become a 
very still of poisonous vapours. Well, well, 
good-afternoon. Let me have the article on 
Thursday morning, and come and see me again 
next Tuesday." 

That was in the early days of my connection 
with him. But after a few months I was ad- 
mitted a member of the chosen band who met 
on Thursday morning, and, with paper and ink 
provided free, lay prone on the back numbers in 
the long attic, and practically wrote the whole 
paper, improving the work of other contrib- 
utors, curtailing their articles, filling them up 
with jokes or parentheses, till they swelled or 
shrank to the required space, and in their own 
special columns, over their own names, in- 
structed the universe on everything under 
heaven, and sometimes made metaphysical ex- 
cursions even there. 

We used to meet at three after a Soho or 
Fleet Street lunch, and wrote continuously until 
we fell asleep, or until the work was done. The 



i8o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

office boy, who loved these days because on them 
we made a point of calling him Mr. Sub-Editor, 
went whistling to and fro, carrying big envel- 
opes to the printers round the corner, and bear- 
ing mighty jugs of beer, from the tavern a few 
doors off, to the perspiring men of genius who 
lay and laughed and toiled on the waste of back 
numbers in the attic room. 

It was a spirited little paper. We used to at- 
tack everybody who was famous, excepting only 
Mr. Kipling, Mr. Sturge Moore, Mr. Yeats, 
and Mr. Laurence Binyon. Each of these four 
had his passionate admirers on the staff, and was 
consequently exempt from criticism. We had 
a gay way with any writer on whose merits we 
had no decided opinions. Two of us would put 
our heads together, and the one write a eulo- 
gium, the other a violent attack. One would 
exalt him as a great contributor to English liter- 
ature, the other jeer at him as a Grub Street 
hack. The two reviews, numbered one and two, 
would be published side by side. It was an en- 
tertaining, admirable system. In matters other 
than literature, we had our fling at everybody, 
except the select, the very select few to whom 
our editor attributed the mysterious " sane Lib- 
eralism " with which he was himself inspired. 
But our happiest moments were when one of our 
company had written a book. We were all 
young and all ambitious. The most energetic 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES i8i 

and diplomatic of us contrived to coax a pub- 
lisher into issuing one book, or even two, every 
year, and, of course, we looked to our own organ 
for a vigorous backing. We got it. On the day 
of publication would appear large-typed, efflo- 
rescent articles, headed "At Last a Novelist," 
or "A Second Balzac," or "An Essayist of 
of Genius," or "The True Spirit in Poetry," and 
one of the staff would redden with pleasure as he 
read the article that referred to him, and wonder 
if this miraculous, this precocious, prodigious, 
world-shaking genius were indeed himself. 

Alas! I doubt whether any article of ours ever 
sold a single book, for we had no circulation. 
Indeed, so notorious did our non-success be- 
come, even among ourselves, though we dis- 
creetly tried to veil our knowl- • 
edge from each other, thatl^o^ 
when the editor 
had arranged with 
three new poets, 
whom I did not 
know by sight, to 
poetry for us, and 
a man in a coffee-house 
reading the paper, 
boldly up to him and asked, 
"Are you Mr. So-and-So, 
Mr. So-and-So, or Mr. So- 
and-So?" 




i82 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

" I am not," he replied. 

" Do you mean to say you bought that paper 
and are not a contributor to it? " The thing was 
a miracle. 

He actually had, and it was so delightful to 
find anyone outside ourselves who read what we 
had written, that I made friends with him at 
once, and have remained in friendship with him 
ever since. But I believe he was the only one. 

It was natural that the editor, who was also 
the proprietor, should at last be compelled to 
abandon a paper so meanly supported. The man 
who took it over made a different thing of it. 
Its youth and jollity and energy were left be- 
hind, and it did its best to become a staid paper 
of the world. The new editor was of those 
Hazlitt classed as " a sort of tittle-tattle — diffi- 
cult to deal with, dangerous to discuss." He 
disliked all suggestion that had not come from 
himself. It was necessary, if an idea were to be 
adopted, to flatter him into thinking it his own. 
I never knew him write an amusing thing, and 
I only once heard him say one, and then it was 
by accident. He had assembled us, and an- 
nounced that in future we should not be allowed 
to sign our articles. The very joy of life was 
gone, but he said he wanted the paper to have 
an individual personality. We protested, and 
he replied quite seriously: "That is all very 
well. But if all you fellows sign your articles, 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 183 

what becomes of my personality?" I forgave 
him everything for that. 

This is not a chapter on newspaper editors, 
but I cannot go on to talk of magazines without 
paying some tribute to the ingenious adven- 
turers, who, more successful than those two, 
manage to keep their little rags afloat. It is 
amazing how many small papers, without any 
circulation, are yet published week by week. 
The secret history of the struggles with the 
printers, who insolently refuse to work when 
their bills are too long overdue, and the battles 
with the contributors, who prefer to be paid 
than otherwise, is as entertaining as the intrigues 
of courtiers to save themselves from downfall 
and disgrace. 

There is a story in Fleet Street now about a 
little paper devoted to mild reform — vegeta- 
rianism, no cruelty to dogs, anti-vaccinationism, 
and the like — whose editor managed to keep 
the paper and himself alive on subsidies from 
religious faddists. From his office at the end of 
an alley he could see his visitors before they ar- 
rived, and when he saw a likely victim in some 
black-coated, righteous old gentleman, he 
opened a Bible and laid it on his desk. Then 
he knelt down at his chair. When the old gen- 
tleman had climbed the stairs, and had inquired 
for him of the office boy, he heard from the 
inner room a solemn, earnest voice: "O Lord, 



1 84 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

soften Thou the heart of some rich man, that of 
his plenty he may give us wherewithal to carry 
on the good work that this small paper does 
in Thy name ..." and so on. He would lift 
a finger to the boy. "Hush!" he would say; 
*^ your master is a good man," and presently go- 
ing in, when the prayer was ended, would write 
out a cheque at least as liberal as it was ill- 
deserved. 

The Jonquil is a famous example. It was 
edited by a man called Beldens, who had a little 
money, but not much. He contrived to retain his 
writers by a most ingenious appeal to their gam- 
bling instincts. Every Saturday all the cheques 
were accurately made out and delivered to the 
contributors. But these soon found that there 
was never more money to the credit of the paper 
in the bank than would pay the first three or 
four of the cheques presented. The rest were 
returned dishonoured. The result was not un- 
amusing, for Beldens had chosen a bank in Ful- 
ham, while his office was in Covent Garden. 
Every Saturday at the appointed time all the 
contributors used to attend, with hansoms, spe- 
cially chosen for the fleetness of their horses, 
waiting in a row outside. Beldens would come, 
smiling and urbane, into the outer office, with 
the bundles of little pink slips. As soon as they 
had been passed round there would be a wild 
scuffle of genius on the stairs, the dishevelled 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 185 

staff would rush out of the door, leap into their 
hansoms, and race pell mell for the bank, the 
fortunate first arrivals dividing with their cab- 
bies the moneys that their respective efficiencies 
had achieved. 

The larger newspapers, and the popular 
monthlies, are not important in Bohemia, ex- 
cept as means of earning money or getting on 
in the world. We flatter ourselves that they 
would be dull without us, but their life is not 
ours. The periodicals that really matter to us 
are of a different kind, and we run them our- 
selves. They are quarterlies, or annuals, never 
perennials. Few survive three issues, and those 
that live long do no honour to their old age. 
For the glory of these papers is their youth. A 
dozen names spring to mind: The Yellow 
Book, The Savoy, The Pageant, all of the time 
when Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Max 
Beerbohm, Frederick Wedmore were not yet 
known and discussed by the laggard public; The 
Butterfly, The Dial of Shannon and Ricketts, 
The Dome of Laurence Housman, W. B. Yeats, 
Laurence Binyon, and another brood of writers; 
down to The Venture, that lived two years, 1904 
and 1905, and then died like the rest. And at 
the present moment at least three new dreams 
are being crystallised into the disillusionment of 
print, and will appear and fail next year. 



1 86 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

These magazines are not like the " Literary 
Souvenirs " and the pocket books of the early 
nineteenth century, to which they have been 
often compared. They have no delicious little 
engravings by popular artists of lovers reading 
books together, nor are they full of " pieces " of 
prose and verse collected from the most oblig- 
ing of the well-known authors of their day. 
They are written and illustrated by men more 
famous in Bohemia than elsewhere. Bohemia 
is the one country whose prophets find most 
honour at home. They are read lovingly by 
their writers, looked at by their illustrators, and 
discussed by all the crowd of young women who, 
by dressing in green gowns without collars, 
wearing embroidered yokes, scorning the Daily 
Mail, and following the fortunes of the studios, 
keep in the forefront of literary and artistic 
progress. 

The Germ is the original of all these under- 
takings. From time to time a set of young men, 
like the Pre-Raphaelites, grow beyond the stage 
of sedulous aping, and find that they are pro- 
ducing something in literature and art that, not 
being a facile imitation of an established mode, 
is difficult to sell. They want a hearing, and 
find their pictures refused by the exhibitions as 
insults to the traditions of art, and their poems 
and stories rejected by the ordinary magazines 
and reviews as incomprehensible rubbish. Half 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 187 

a dozen poets, painters, and prosemen put their 
heads together, and plan a magazine that is not 
to be as others, gross, vapid, servile to a vulgar 
or sentimental taste, but a sword to cut upwards 
through the conventional fog to the brightness 
and glory of a new constellation of ideals. You 
must be one of them to appreciate their pictures, 
and have read what they have read to enjoy their 
writings. They hear " different drummers," 
and all who are not for them are against them. 
It is in such ventures that the men who are later 
to be accepted with applause make their first 
appearance. " The Blessed Damozel " was pub- 
lished in The Germ when few knew anything of 
the Pre-Raphaelites. The Germ was a com- 
mercial failure, but who has not heard of 
Rossetti? 

Few printed things are more delightful or 
more troublesome to produce than one of these 
free-lance miscellanies. The editors (there is 
usually a committee of at least three) go about 
in pride, conscious of the vitality of their move- 
ment, scornful of popular ignorance, and hope- 
ful in their secret hearts that they are making 
history as others did before them. They carry 
with them through the studios the glorious feel- 
ing that " there is something in the air." They 
spend whole nights planning together, examin- 
ing a dozen diflferent kinds of papers, to find one 
suitable alike for blocks and text, comparing 



1 88 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

specimens from twenty printers. All is pleas- 
ant for them until their friends, outside the par- 
ticular set that work together and believe in 
each other, begin to offer contributions. It is a 
difficult thing to tell a man that his work is not 
good enough, when he is no younger than your- 
self ; it is an insult to suggest that he belongs to 
an older school, that his is a dying day, and that 
you cannot join the evening and the morning 
lights in this paper of yours that is to represent 
the dawn. But it must be done; and it is likely 
that thenceforth there is a studio you must not 
visit, an injured man whom you must skilfully 
avoid in taking your place at the Soho dinner- 
tables. 

That is one of the difficulties; another, even 
more serious, is of finance. It is a sad thing that 
financiers are not often constructed like poets, 
eager to spill their best for the sweetness and 
joy of spilling it. It is hard that a man of money 
can seldom be persuaded to run a magazine ex- 
cept with a view to material profit. Even if the 
enhanced price of The Germ makes him think 
that another Garland of Youth, another Miscel- 
lany sounding another bugle, will, if better ad- 
vertised, pay (loathsome word!) from the first, 
he assumes command of your fair vision, as if of 
a department store, inserts some terrible verses 
by a friend of his, and turns your dream to dust 
before your eyes. I was connected with one such 



NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 189 

performance, run for sordid gain by a financier, 
and it was a miserable affair. The stupid fellow 
saw money in poetry and pictures, as he might 
have seen it in corn or beef. He knew nothing, 
and it was as if the magazine had been edited 
by a five-shilling piece. Each new contributor 
that he enrolled spun him in a new direction. 
One suggested a second, and the second sug- 
gested a third, so that the prose, the poetry, and 
the pictures sounded the whole gamut of intel- 
lectual notes, and the original projectors retired 
in disgust, to the financier's surprise. Of all 
such magazines, as he ruefully claimed for it, it 
was the most varied. It was also the least 
successful. It represented money instead of 
youth. 

No; you have not only to catch your financier, 
but to tame him. He must understand that he 
is no more than the means to the end, and be 
proud of his subjection, happy never to see his 
money again, and content to have contributed 
his insignificant aid to the progress of literature 
and art. When such a man is discovered, which 
is not often, there is joy in Bohemia. The 
models, gossiping as they go, carry the great 
news. In a dozen studios men paint as their 
caprice takes them, and in a dozen lodgings 
imps of freedom ride a dozen pens. The 
shackles are off at last, that is the cry, and some- 
thing fresh and extravagant is the result; some- 



IQO 



BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



thing that overshoots the mark by its own vig- 
our, but shows by its direction that there is a 
mark to be shot at, at which people have not 
aimed before. 




WAYS AND MEANS 



WAYS AND MEANS 

A LITTLE time ago there was a great 
outcry against what was called " lit- 
erary ghosting," a fraudulent passing 
off of the work of unknown writers 
under more famous names. There was a corre- 
spondence in a literary paper that betrayed how 
novels were written in the rough by mexperi- 
enced hands under the guidance of hardened 
manufacturers of serials; and, indeed, when we 
consider only how many prominent athletes of 
no particular literary ability are able to publish 
books on their profession, it is obvious that a 
good deal of this kind of business must be done. 
Indeed, in one form or another, ghosting is one 
of the usual ways by which the unfortunate 
young writer sustains himself in Grub Street, 
or Bohemia, or whatever else you like to call 
that indefinite country where big longings and 
high hopes are matched by short purses and 
present discomforts. 

Many a man has been saved from what 
seemed a descent into the drudgeries of clerk- 
ship by the different drudgery of writing, say, 
the reminiscences of an admiral, the history of a 

193 



194 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

parish, or innumerable short reviews, for which 
other people got the credit. And Richard Sav- 
age, in his witty pamphlet called "An Author 
to Be Let," betrays that the abuse is not only of 
our day. Iscariot Hackney of that book con- 
fesses that: 

" Many a time I wrote obscenity and profane- 
ness, under the names of Pope or Swift. Some- 
times I was Mr. Joseph Gay, and at others 
Theory Burnet, or Addison. I abridged his- 
tories and travels, translated from the French 
what they never wrote, and was expert at finding 
out new titles for old books. When a notorious 
thief was hanged, I was the Plutarch to preserve 
his memory; and when a great man died, mine 
were his Remains, and mine the account of his 
last will and testament." That is the whole 
trade put in a paragraph. 

Nowadays the matter has been reduced to 
system. There are men who are paid to write 
all the reviews in a paper, and farm out the 
work piecemeal, or even get ambitious boys and 
girls to do it for them, by way of apprentice- 
ship, paying them a meagre wage. There are 
agents who make a living by supplying ghost- 
written books to publishers who keep up for 
appearance sake the pretence of not being in the 
know. They get their twenty, forty, fifty pounds 
a volume, and have them written by impecu- 
nious Bohemians to whom they pay the weekly 



WAYS AND MEANS 195 

salary of a junior clerk. Here is a true account 
of a youthful ghost. 

He was a poet, and in those days a bad one. 
He carried more poor verses than good money 
in his pocket. And one day, when he had little 
more than a few coppers and some penny 
stamps, he happened to see an advertisement for 
" a young and experienced writer with a thor- 
ough knowledge of athletics." He kept the ap- 
pointment suggested by the newspaper, and 
found a mean house in one of the southern sub- 
urbs. A herd of lean fellows were waiting in a 
dirty passage, and presently a cheerful, business- 
like little man came out, and chose him with one 
companion as the likeliest-looking of the lot. 
They were set to write, at tables in the corners 
of an undusted, cat-haunted room, specimen 
chapters of a book on croquet. They were both 
appointed, and the other man, an old hand, bor- 
rowed five shillings in advance. Next day, when 
the young fellow arrived in the morning, he 
found that his colleague was there before him, 
drunk, holding the garden railings, and shout- 
ing blasphemies at a bedraggled cat that slunk 
about the waste scrap of ground behind them. 
The agent held up the drunkard to him as a 
warning, told him that sobriety was the spirit of 
success, and that, as he had the job to himself, 
he would be allowed to gain extra experience by 
doing the other man's work as well as his own. 



196 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

He was young, enthusiastic, glad to have an 
opportunity of working at all. In two months 
he had finished six books, that still annoy him 
by showing their bright-lettered covers on the 
railway bookstalls. He wrote on an average 
between two and four thousand words a day. 
At last, one day when he was working in an 
upper room of the agent's house, the little 
creature came upstairs and saw fit to congrat- 
ulate him. " You are doing very well indeed," 
he said, " for one so unaccustomed to literary 
labour." That brought an end to the engage- 
ment. He left immediately, lest he should be 
unable to refrain from throwing an inkpot at 
the agent's head. It is in its way rather fun to 
be suddenly an authority on subjects of which 
you knew nothing till you sat down to write 
about them. And it is very good practice in 
journalism — though it is always easier to write 
when you are ignorant than when you know too 
much; you have a freer hand. But for a poet 
to hear such work called literary labour! That 
was too much. He never returned, and the 
agent was left sorrowing for the loss of an indus- 
trious hack. 

Of course, the young man, you will say, 
should never have stooped to such work. He 
ought to have borrowed, or persuaded his land- 
lady to let him live until his good luck should 
bring the settlement of her bills. But he could 



WAYS AND MEANS 197 

not borrow. There are some unfortunates who 
cannot; I hate borrowing myself. And it is an 
awful thing to be without money and miserably 
afraid of tiding over evil straits on somebody 
else's. Some there are, brave, high-souled fel- 
lows, who could borrow the world to play at 
ball, and never feel the responsibility, whereas 
others are uneasy and not themselves with a sin- 
gle shilling that does not belong to them. Some 
seem to live on credit as naturally as they 
breathe, and I remember the surprise of one of 
these: "What! You don't owe anybody any- 
thing! Good Lord! man, lend me half a sov- 
ereign!" 

People who by some misfortune of nature are 
unable to risk dishonesty by borrowing without 
having certain means of repayment are reduced 
to all kinds of unhappy expedients, and some- 
times even to dying, like poor Chatterton,* in 
order to make both ends meet. Of him John- 
son could say, " This is the most extraordinary 
young man that has encountered my knowledge. 
It is wonderful how the whelp has written such 
things," and yet, after three months' fight among 
the papers, living on almost nothing, and writ- 
ing home to his people brave, proud letters about 
his success, to keep them from anxiety, he spent 
three days without food, and then killed him- 
self with arsenic, rather than accept from a land- 
lady the food for which he doubted his ability 

* In Brook Street, Holbom. 



198 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

to repay her. The most terrible detail in the 
tragedy was the memorandum that lay near him 
when he died, and showed that over ten pounds 
were owed him by his publishers. Ah, me! in 
the days when I read that story ten pounds 
seemed opulence for a lifetime. It seemed a 
cruel and impossible thing, as all cruelty seems 
when we are young, that one who was owed so 
much should yet starve into suicide. 

This is one of the worst hardships of painter 
or writer. His money, even when earned, is as 
intangible as the dawn. It is gold, but he may 
not handle it; real, but a dream. He must live, 
while he does his work, on air, and then, when 
the picture hangs in the drawing-room of the 
purchaser, and the article has been printed, pub- 
lished, and forgotten, he must wait, perhaps for 
months, perhaps for years, and sometimes, in- 
deed, until he is passed into another world where 
he can have no opportunity of spending it, for 
the money that is his. It is not until he is a 
success, or at least no longer an anonymous Bo- 
hemian, that his money is paid in advance, or 
upon the completion of his labour. Little won- 
fler that when at last it comes, it comes as a sur- 
prise, and sends him gaily into bright extrava- 
gance that leaves him with a purse as empty as 
before. 

I have heard people say that all the wild, ir- 
regular struggle for existence that was known 



WAYS AND MEANS 199 

by Goldsmith, by Johnson, by old Roberto 
Greene, has faded away from the literary life. 
They say that now, young men, top-hatted, 
frock-coated, enter the offices of newspapers, 
earn comfortable salaries, write their novels or 
whatever they may be in their spare hours, and 
arrive, neat, unruffled as Civil Servants, by mere 
process of time at their success. It is not so. 
" Once a sub-editor always a sub-editor," said 
a very successful one, who had given up hope of 
succeeding at anything else. He was well 
known, his books had sold better than better 
books, and his portrait had been often in the 
papers; but that was not the success he had 
wanted, nor a success that was worth having, and 
he was honest enough to admit it to himself. 
The men who really care for their art, who wish 
above all things to do the best that is in them, do 
not take the way of the world and the regular 
salaries of the newspaper offices. They stay out- 
side, reading, writing, painting for themselves, 
and snatching such golden crumbs as fall within 
their reach from the tables of publishers, edi- 
tors, and picture-buyers. They make a living, 
as it were, by accident. It is a hard life and a 
risky; it is deliciously exciting at first, to leap 
from crag to crag, wherever a slight handhold 
will preserve you from the abyss, but the time 
soon comes when you are tired, and wonder, 
with dulled heart and clouded brain, is it worth 



200 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

while or no? Those who are strong enough to 
continue are given their own souls to carry in 
their hands, and those who admit defeat, sur- 
render them, and, knowing in their hearts that 
they have sold themselves, hide their sorrow in 
a louder clamour after an easier quest. 

The jolliest of the irregulars, in spite of the 
anxiety of their life, are those who carry on a 
guerrilla warfare for fame and a long struggle 
for improvement, never having been caught or 
maimed by the newspaper routine, or by the 
drudgery of commercial art work. (For artists 
as well as writers have an easy way to a liveli- 
hood, which they also must have strength to 
resist.) Some men live as free lances by selling 
their articles to such papers as are willing to 
admit their transcendent worth, and ready to 
pay some small nominal rate, a guinea a thou- 
sand words perhaps, for the privilege of print- 
ing them. Many live by reviewing, getting half 
a dozen books a week from different papers, 
reading or skimming them, and writing as long 
a paragraph as the editor will allow on each 
volume. The artists coax dealers into buying 
small pictures at a cheap rate, satisfying their 
pride by contemplation of the vastly larger price 
at which their purchasers seem to value them as 
soon as they appear in the glamour of the win- 
dow. Others again, artists and writers, too — 
these, perhaps, the most sincere and admirable 



WAYS AND MEANS 201 

of the lot — refuse any degradation of their art, 
and live hand to mouth by any sort of work that 
offers. There was one man who wrote poems in 
the intervals of stage carpentry, and another 
who made dolls while compiling a history of 
philosophy. Some, indeed, seem able to live on 
nothing at all, and these are more cheerful than 
the rest whose stomachs are less accommodating. 
There are compensations to poverty, and one 
of them is extravagance. Goldsmith would not 
so have enjoyed the pomp of his bloom-coloured 
suits and his gorgeous Brick Court chambers if 
he had not known an earlier and different life: 

" Where the Red Lion, staring o'er the way, 
Invites each passing stranger that can pay ; 
Where Calvert's butt and Parson's black champagne 
Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane ; 
There in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug, 
The Muse found Scroggen stretched beneath a rug ; 
A w^indow, patched with paper, lent a ray 
That dimly showed the state in which he lay ; 
The sanded floor, that grits beneath the tread ; 
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread; 
The royal game of goose was there in view, 
And the twelve rules the Royal Martyr drew ; 
The Seasons, framed with listing, found a place. 
And brave Prince William showed his lamp-black face ; 
The morn was cold ; he views with keen desire 
The rusty grate unconscious of a fire : 
With beer and milk arrears the frieze was scored. 
And five crack'd teacups dress'd the chimney board ; 
A night-cap decked his brows instead of bay, 
A cap by night — a stocking all the day I " 



202 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Johnson enjoyed his pension and all that it 
meant the more for having known a time when 
he spent the night hours with Richard Savage 
walking round and round St. James's Square, 
for want of a lodging, inveighing cheerfully 
against the Ministry, and " resolving they would 
stand by their country." 

The moments of opulence when they come are 
the brighter gold for the grey anxiety that has 
gone before. They make extravagance a joy in 
itself, and even change the distresses of the past 
into a charming memory. 

I had lived once for over a week on a diet of 
cheese and apples — cheap yellow cheese and 
apples at twopence or a penny halfpenny a 
pound. A friend, also impoverished, was shar- 
ing my expenses and my diet, and slept in a 
small room in the same house. Our two sleep- 
ing boxes, for they were no more, were on the 
ground floor, and a large, fat postman, our land- 
lord, slept in the basement underneath. On the 
Wednesday of the second week, by the three 
o'clock post, came a letter for my friend, from 
a literary agent, containing a cheque for twenty- 
five pounds— TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS! It is an 
amazing fact, but I do believe the tears came 
into our eyes at the sight of that little slip of 
magenta-coloured paper. We shook hands 
hysterically, and then — remembering that the 
bank closed at four — unshaved as we were, with- 



WAYS AND MEANS 203 

out collars, with baggy trousers, we took a han- 
som for the town. The cheque was cashed, and 
that somehow seemed a marvel, as the five- 
pound notes and the gold were slid over the 
counter in a way most astonishingly matter of 
fact. We went out of the bank doors with a new 
dignity, paid the cabby, and walked the Strand 
like giants. It became quite a question what 
place was best worthy of the honour of enter- 
taining us to tea. Wherever it was — I fancy a 
small cafe — it did its duty, and we sat, refreshed 
and smoking (new opened packets of the best 
tobacco) while we planned our evening. 

At half-past six we went up to Soho, and 
crossed Leicester Square with solemnity, as be- 
fitted men with an aim in life, and that so phil- 
anthropic as to dine better that night than ever 
in their lives before. There was no undignified 
hurry about our walk, but there was no linger- 
ing. I was rebuked for glancing at the window 
of a print shop, and in my turn remonstrated 
equally gravely with him for dallying over some 
pretty editions at a bookseller's in Shaftesbury 
Avenue. 

We dined at one of our favourite little res- 
taurants: we dined excellently, drank several 
bottles of wine, and had liqueur glasses of rum 
emptied into our coffees. We smoked, paid the 
bill, and went out into the narrow Soho street. 
Just opposite, at the other side, where we could 



204 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

not help seeing it as we hesitated on the pave- 
ment, was another of our favourite feeding 
places. The light was merry through the win- 
dows, the evening was young, and — without 
speaking a word, we looked at each other, and 
looked at each other again, and then, still with- 
out speaking, walked across the street, went in 
at the inviting door, and had dinner over again 
— an excellent dinner, good wine, and rum in 
coffee, as before. 

Remember the week's diet of apples and 
cheese before you condemn us. We argued it 
out as we smoked over our second coffees, and 
convinced ourselves clearly that if our two din- 
ners had been spread evenly and with taste over 
our last ten most ill-nourished days, we should 
not yet have had the food that honest men de- 
serve. That being so, we stood upon our rights, 
and gave clear consciences to our grateful 
stomachs. 

On our way home we met an old acquaint- 
ance, whose hospitality a few days before would 
have been as manna from heaven, but whose 
port, good though it was, was now almost super- 
fluous. We reached our lodgings at three in the 
morning, and my last memory of the festival is 
that of my friend, usually a rather melancholy 
man, sitting on my bed drumming with his feet 
upon the floor, and singing Gaelic songs at the 
top of his voice, to a zealous accompaniment on 



WAYS AND MEANS 205 

my penny whistle. From below came a regular 
grunting monotone — the landlord snoring in 
bed. Presently there was a deep thud that star- 
tled us for a moment into quiet. We listened, 
and almost at once the snoring boomed again, 
as the postman slumbered on the floor where he 
had fallen. Then we continued our minstrelsy. 
It is an up-and-down life, my friends — it is 
indeed. 



TALKING, DRINKING AND SMOKING 

(WITH A PROCESSION OF DRINKING SONGS) 




TALKING, DRINKING AND SMOKING 

(WITH A PROCESSION OF DRINKING 
SONGS) 

TALKING, drinking, and smoking go 
better together than any three other 
pleasant things upon this earth. And 
they are best enjoyed in company, 

which is almost as much as *« «^J. thf,*^^^,';^ "^ 
not best performed at home. Individually they 
n^ay be— a pipe over your own fire, a glass oi 
wine close by the elbow of your own easy-chair, 
a quiet, comfortable talk with your particular 
friend, whose opinions you know before they are 
uttered, are severally very delightful. But it 
good liquor, talk, and smoke are to be enjoyed 
fo the utmost, why, then, get you half a do^^e^^^ 
honest fellows about you, with no particular 
qualification, and have your evenmg out Go 
?o a tavern or a coffee-house, where you will be 
left to yourselves. Be free from womenfolk, 
with their pestilential seriousness, or more ag- 
gravating flippancy. Get you and your company 
fnt Ja cofey room, with a bright fire and a closed 



2IO BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

door, where you may be free men before the 
universe. Then may your words express the 
mood you feel, the liquor hearten you, and the 
smoke soothe you in argument; and if with that 
you are not happy, why, then, the devil fly away 
with you for a puritanical, melancholiac spoil- 
sport, whom I would not see with my book in his 
hands, no, not for four shillings and sixpence on 
the nail. 

No, sir, if you cannot be happy so, why, you 
are a fellow unclubable, unsociable, a creature 
without human instincts — no true man. I'll 
have none of you, and if your name come up for 
election at any of our clubs, I'll blackball you 
with all my heart, and wish the ball were twice 
as black and twice as big. 

Not that I am a friend to drunkenness and 
bestiality: far from it. Only children lick honey 
from the spoon. But spread honey with bread 
and butter, and season good liquor with mirth 
and company, talk and tobacco, and either is a 
gift from the gods. Nor do tavern brawls, those 
itinerant extravagances, stand higher in my fa- 
vour, dear though they are to the irregulars who 
practise them. To sup with ale at the Cheshire 
Cheese, to drink at the Punch Bowl, at the Green 
Dragon, at the Mitre, at the Cock, at the Gre- 
cian, at the George, at the Edinburgh — in short, 
to beat the bounds of every tavern in Fleet 
Street, from Ludgate Circus to the Strand, that 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 211 

IS a festival too peripatetic to be comfortable, an 
undertaking too serious to be lighthearted. 

But you, sir, who smile at the thought of beer 
—or is it port or sherry, or perhaps good, rol- 




licking, stout-flavoured rum?— who dream joy- 
fully of brown-walled rooms, of tables worn 
and polished, covered with stained rings where 
the bounty of innumerable glasses has over- 
flowed their brims, whose eyes are alight with 



212 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

the fire of the fine things you are ready to say, 
whose pipe is even now in your hands, you are 
a man of another sort and the right one. You 
do not forget that the first and proudest of man's 
inventions when his reason came to him was a 
club, that Bacchus was the favourite of the an- 
cient gods, and Silenus the most lovable of the 
sub-divinities. You remember that the Scandi- 
navian heaven was a club, Valhalla, where the 
heroes met to enjoy themselves, and fight with 
swords even as we fight with arguments, and 
after the fighting to drink, and sing, and be good 
fellows one to the other. You regret each cen- 
tury for the merry, companionable evenings you 
have missed by living in another time. You, 
and you alone, will read with the right under- 
standing, with a smile of sympathetic memory, 
with no lemon-juiced condemnation tightening 
your lips. 

What an illustrious company is ours: Ben 
Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Herrick, Con- 
greve — the list would fill the book. Cromwell 
was not against us, and even Doctor Johnson 
(although he did drink port, bottle by bottle, 
in his own company — a swinish, inhuman pro- 
cedure) wrote for us our philosophy: 

" Hermit hoar in solemn cell, 

Wearing out life's evening grey, 
Strike thy bosom sage, and tell, 

What is bliss, and which the way? 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 213 

" Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, 
Scarce repressed the starting tear, 
When the hoary sage replied, 

' Come, my lad, and drink some beer/ " 

Once, after an evening spent in a tavern with 
a mob of honest, open-hearted fellows, I sat in 
my chair at home, before going to bed, thmkmg 
of the older time. I was smoking the last pipe, 
the mystical last pipe that is always full of 
dreams, and seemed suddenly to see all ages 
together, and the Bohemians of all time commg 
through the walls into my room. 

Ben Jonson, pimple-nosed, strong-headed, ap- 
peared sitting in an easy-chair, as if in the Devil 
room at the Apollo, reading a paper sent him 
from his friend Master Beaumont, who was 
busy with Master Fletcher in the country, writ- 
ing a play. He read aloud : 

" Methinks the little wit I had Is lost 
Since I saw you;" 
(honest fellow. Master Beaumont, generous mmdl) 

" for wit is like a rest 
Held up at tennis, which men do the best 
With the best gamesters. What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtle flame, 
As If that every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit In a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life; there where there hath been thrown 
Wit able enough to justify the town 



214 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

For three days past : with that might warrant be 

For the whole city to talk foolishly, 

Till that were cancelled ; and when that was gone, 

We left an air behind us, which alone 

Was able to make the next two companies 

Right witty; though but downright fools, more wise." 

" Aha, they know their Ben. They know him." 
He fell to murmuring over his own verses : 

" Welcome all who lead or follow 
To the Oracle of Apollo — 
Here he speaks out of his pottle, 
Or the tripos, his tower bottle: 
All his answers are divine. 
Truth itself doth flow in wine. 
Hang up all the poor hop-drinkers, 
Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers; 
He the half of life abuses 
That sits watering with the Muses. 
Those dull girls no good can mean us; 
Wine it is the milk of Venus, 
And the poet's horse accounted ; 
Ply it, and you all are mounted. 
'Tis the true Phoebian liquor, 
Cheers the brain, makes wit the quicker; 
Pays all debts, cures all diseases. 
And at once three senses pleases. 
Welcome all who lead or follow 
To the Oracle of Apollo." 

" A very charming rhyme in praise of grape 
liquor," I was about to say, *^but a little too 
scornful of ale. Ale is a good drink, and hearty, 
the parent of as much good prose as ever Span- 
ish wine made good verse." I was about to say 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 215 

this, when I saw a gaily dressed little man, with 
a tankard in one hand and a sheaf of paper in 
the other, come walking through my bookcase. 
I knew Mr. Gay at once, and guessed that he 
had come to battle for the best of drinks. But, 
before he could speak, a pretty little parson fel- 
low skipped into the room, bowed unctuously to 
Ben, shot this verse at him, and withdrew: 

" Ah, Ben, 
Say how or when 
Shall we thy guests 
Meet at those lyric feasts, 
Made at the Sun, 
The Dog, the Triple Tun? 
Where we such clusters had 
As made us nobly wild, not mad ; 
And yet each verse of thine 
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." 

"Herrick!" cried Ben joyfully, but he was 
gone, and little Mr. Gay was bowing in his 
place. Placing his dripping tankard on a new 
volume of poems that lay on my table, he bowed 
respectfully to my distinguished guest, and then, 
laying his left hand easily upon his sword-hilt, 
sang merrily and with a provocative, mischiev- 
ous air: 

" Whilst some in epic strains delight, 
Whilst other pastorals invite, 

As taste or whim prevail: 
Assist me, all ye tuneful Nine; 
Support me in the great design, 

To sing of nappy ale. 



2l6 



BOHEMIA IN LONDON 



** Some folks of cyder make a rout, 
And cyder's well enough no doubt, 

When better liquors fall ; 
But wine, that's richer, better still, 
Ev'n wine itself (deny *t who will), 
Must yield to nappy ale. 

" Rum, brandy, gin with choicest smack 
From Holland brought, Batavia arrack, 

All these will nought avail 
To cheer a truly British heart, 
And lively spirits to impart, 
Like humming, nappy ale. 

" Oh ! whether I thee closely hug 
In honest can or nut-brown jug, 

Or in the tankard hail ; 
In barrel, or In bottle pent, 
I give the generous spirit vent. 
Still may I feast on ale. 

' But chief when to the chearful glass 
From vessel pure thy streamlets pass. 
Then most thy charms prevail ; 

Then, then, I'll bet, and take 

the odds 
That nectar, drink of heathen 
gods. 

Was poor compar'd 
to ale. 



><ii« 




" Give me a bumper, fill it up. 
See how it sparkles In the cup. 
Oh, how shall I regale! 
Can any taste this drink divine 
And then compare rum, brandy, wine. 
Or ought with nappy ale ? " 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 217 

He paused for a moment to take a long drink 
from the tankard, which he replaced on the 
poetry book. Then, delicately wiping his lips, 
which were curved with satisfaction, he went on : 



" Inspir'd by thee, the warrior fights, 
The lover wooes, the poet writes, 

And pens the pleasing tale; 
And still in Britain's isle confess'd 
Nought animates the patriot's breast 

Like generous, nappy ale. 



High Church and 

Low oft raise a 

strife, 
And oft endanger 

limb and life. 
Each studious to 
prevail ; 
Yet Whig and Tory, opposite 
In all things else, do both unite ^_ ^^^^^ 

In praise of nappy ale. ^ "^t^ 



O blest potation! still by thee. 

And thy companion Liberty, 

Do health and 

mirth prevail ; 

Then let us crown 

the can, the glass. 

And sportive bid the 

minutes pass ^ 
In quaffing nappy ale. 





2i8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

" Ev'n while these stanzas I indite, 
The bar bell's grateful sounds invite 

Where joy can never fail! 
Adieu! my Muse, adieu! I haste 
To gratify my longing taste 

With copious draughts of ALE." 

He had scarcely finished, and was emptying 
the tankard, when John Keats appeared (I had 
not seen him coming). 

" Shades of poets dead and gone," 

he chanted, coughing painfully, but keeping a 
smiling face, that made kind old Ben Jonson 
wince : 

" Shades of poets dead and gone. 
What elysium have ye knov^n, 
Happy field or mossy cavern, 
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern ? " 

"Aha! You are a friend for me, sirl" cried 
Gay, and taking him familiarly by the arm, 
walked off with him through the writing desk. 
They were not ten yards away before they were 
walking apart, quarrelling vigorously, which 
was puzzling, till I remembered that Keats was 
no drinker of nappy ale, but so passionate a lover 
of wine that he once covered all the inside of his 
mouth and throat with cayenne pepper, in order 
to enjoy " the delicious coolness of claret in all 
its glory." 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 219 

"Who is that young man?" asked Ben; but 
before I could answer him there was the stump, 
stumping of a wooden leg, and little William 
Davies stood before us. He was laughing mer- 
rily, and sang: 

"Oh, what a merry world I see 

Before me through a quart of ale. 
Now if sometimes that men would laugh, 

And women too would sigh and wail 

To laugh or wail's an easy task 
For all who drink at my ale-cask." * 

"Ale, all ale," interrupted Ben Jonson. 
" Why do they sing of ale? " 

" Here's whisky for you then!" cried Davies, 
and sang mournfully: 

** Whisky, thou blessed heaven in the brain, 
Oh, that the belly should revolt, 
To make a hell of after pain, 

And prove thy virtue was a fault! 

" Did ever poet seek his bed 

With a sweet phrase upon his lips 
Smiling — as I laid down my head. 
Pleased after sundry whisky-sips? 

" I pitied all the world: alas! 

That no poor nobodies came near, 
To give to them my shirt and shoes, 
And bid them be of goodly cheer. 

♦From "New Poems/' By William Davies. Published by Mr. 
Elkin Mathews. 



220 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

" A blessed heaven was in the brain ; 

But ere came morn the belly turned 
And kicked up hell's delight in pain — 

This tongue went dry, this throat it burned. 



"Oh, dear! oh, dear! to think last night 
The merriest man on earth was I, 
And that I should awake this morn. 

To cough and groan, to heave and sigh 1 " * 



" Nay, nay," said Ben, surprised, *^ I know 
nothing of all that." 

There are some, who do not understand true 
enjoyment, will tell you that rules spoil convivial 
meetings, and that a merry company becomes a 
dull committee as soon as it is called a club. Do 
not believe them: the precedents are all against 
them. Unless you have a club to regulate the 
times and seasons of your mirth you are likely 
enough to be merry when your friends are sad, 
and melancholy when they are joyful. Whereas, 
if all the week you have a pleasant conscious- 
ness that on Wednesday, say, or Thursday night 
there will be jollity, you go to the tavern in 
the proper spirit, and smile before you turn the 
door. And as for rules, why, rules are half the 
fun. You remember Ben Jonson's own: 

* From " New Poems." 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 221 

Idlota, Insulsus, trlstis, turpi's, abesto. 

Eruditi, urbani, hllares, honesti, adsclscuntor ; 

Nee lectae feminae repudlantor. 

De discubitu non contenditor. 

Vina purls fontibus ministrantor aut vapulet hospes. 

Insipida poemata nulla recitantor. 

Amatorils querelis, ac suspiriis liber angulus esto. 

Qui foras vel dicta, vel facta eliminet, eliminator. 

There are some of them, and are they not admir- 
ably contrived? (Though I suspect the third, 
and the one about a corner for lovers, v^ere dic- 
tated by some momentary caprice of the poet 
himself, contrary as they are to all the best prac- 
tice in England. In France it has always been 
the thing: the student's mistress hears her lord 
discuss; but here, until very lately, men have 
talked and smoked to themselves.) The neat 
compliment to the members insinuated by the 
first and second — no objectionables admitted, 
and the v^hole company able to congratulate 
themselves as learned, urbane, jolly, and honest 
men — is delightful. There was to be no squab- 
bling for places; the wine was to be kept at a 
good level quality by the simplest means; no 
fool to interrupt the flow of talk with his taste- 
less verse, and all reporters to be expelled. What 
evenings those must have been! It is easy to 
imagine the door open to each newcomer primed 
up with the hope of happiness, glancing about 
to see which of his friends were there before 



222 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

him, and bowing to receive a nod from the great 
Ben. And late at night, when all was over, can 
you not envy them, strolling, rolling, tumbling, 
strutting out into the moonlight of old Temple 
Bar, with their heads full of wholesome wit and 
wine? 

Then, for another set of rules, remember those 
" enacted by a Knot of Artizans and Mechan- 
ics," as Addison read them " upon the wall in a 
little Alehouse." 

" I. Every Member at his first coming shall 
lay down his Two Pence. 

" II. Every Member shall fill his Pipe out 
of his own Box. 

" III. If any Member absents himself he 
shall forfeit a Penny for the Use of the Club, 
unless in Case of Sickness or Imprisonment. 

" IV. If any Member swears or curses, his 
Neighbour may give him a Kick upon the 
Shins. 

" V. If any Member tells Stories in the Club 
that are not true, he shall forfeit for every third 
Lie a Halfpenny. 

^' VI. If any Member strikes another wrong- 
fully, he shall pay his Club for him. 

" VII. If any Member brings his Wife into 
the Club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks 
or smoaks. 

" VIII. If any Member's wife comes to fetch 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 223 

him home from the Club, she shall speak to him 
without the Door. 

" IX. If any Member calls another Cuckold, 
he shall be turned out of the Club. 

''X. None shall be admitted into the Club 
that is of the same Trade with any Member 
of it. 

" XL None of the Club shall have his Clothes 
or Shoes made or mended but by a Brother 
Member. 

"XII. No Non-juror shall be capable of be- 
ing a Member." 

The humorous third rule, the somewhat dis- 
concerting fifth, the cynical eighth, all these are 
pleasant, but the tenth and twelfth contain more 
club wisdom than all the others put together. 
For the tenth rule secures to each member the 
right to speak on one subject with authority. 
Silenced, for example, in an argument on knife- 
grinding, the carpenter can solace himself by 
bragging of his exclusive knowledge of joinery, 
a solid comfort that would vanish if a rival car- 
penter should cross the threshold — for then, at 
the moment of the poor fellow's discomfiture, 
when still weak from the conflict with the 
grinder of knives, his supremacy in his own busi- 
ness might be usurped, and he be left nincom- 
poop forever. And as for the twelfth rule, it is 
the neatest conceived of safeguards against fad- 



224 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dists. It is as if we in one of our clubs were to 
prohibit vegetarians or anti-vaccinationists. It is 
a charming testimony to the beef and beer san- 
ity of the members (a shoemaker and a tailor 

from internal evidence. How ingratiating 

looks "Brother Member" on the paper I) who 
wrote the rules. 

It is impossible to get away from the rules of 
the old clubs before listening for a moment to 
those that governed " the moral philosophers, as 
they called themselves, who assembled twice a 
week, in order to show the absurdity of the pres- 
ent mode of religion and establish a new one in 
its stead." Their rules, as Goldsmith says, " will 
give a most just idea of their learning and prin- 
ciples." Some of his own clubs cannot have 
been very different. 

" I. We being a laudable society of moral 
philosophers, intends to dispute twice a week 
about religion and priestcraft; leaving behind 
us old wives' tales, and following good learning 
and sound sense: and if so be that any other 
persons has a mind to be of the society, they 
shall be entitled so to do, upon paying the sum 
of three shillings, to be spent by the company in 
punch. 

" II. That no member get drunk before nine 
of the clock, upon pain of forfeiting three pence, 
to be spent by the company in punch. 



TALKING, DRINKING, SMOKING 225 

" III. That, as members are sometimes apt to 
go way without paying, every person sliall pay 
sixpence upon his entering the room; and all 
disputes shall be settled by a majority, and all 
fines shall be paid in punch. 

"IV. That sixpence shall be every night 
given to the president, in order to buy books of 
learning for the good of the society: the presi- 
dent has already put himself to a good deal ot 
expense in buying books for the club particu- 
larly the works of TuUy, Socrates, and Cicero, 
which he will soon read to the society. 

""V AH them who brings a new argument 
agains't religion, and who being a philosopher 
and a man of learning, as the rest of us is, shall 
be admitted to the freedom of the society, upon 
paying sixpence only, to be spent in punch. 

" VI Whenever we are to have an extraor- 
dinary meeting, it shall be advertised by some 
outlandish name in the newspapers. 

" Sanders MacWild, President. 

" Anthony BlewIT, Vice-President. 

his X '^^^^ „ 

"William TURPIN, Secretary.' 

What clubs there must have been; and yet 
why regret them? What clubs there are to-day; 
what clubs there will be until man changes his 
nature, and becomes an animal that does not 
talk, or drink, or smoke. If you, O honest, not 



226 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

inhuman, reader, ever find your way into Bo- 
hemia, my best wish for you is a club, a com- 
pany of fellows as jolly as yourself, a good, cosey 
room, a free-burning hearth, plenty of whatever 
tobacco smokes best in your pipe, of whatever 
liquor flows easiest in your gullet, of what- 
ever talk, of poetry, of romance, of pictures, 
sounds sweetest in your ears. Or, if you have 
been in Bohemia, and now are far away, or 
grown old, may this chapter suggest the evenings 
of your youth and (but it would need to be better 
written) bring back something of the old good- 
fellowship that made those evenings so hearty a 
delight. 



OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 




OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 

IT is only lately that Hampstead has become 
an integral part of London ; only a century 
since one could be stopped by highway- 
men on one's way into town from the 
Heath. It used to be the most beautiful country 
within reach of the city, and so a proper place 
for " shoemakers' holidays " and for retirement. 
Even now you may go to sleep behind a bush in 
one of the little wooded valleys of the Heath, 
and doubt on waking if you are not in a dream, 
when you hear the bells of London churches 
strike the hours. In those older days, when 
there were fewer houses, and the city had not 
yet swept the edge of the green with her dusty 
grey petticoat, it was no wonder that Hamp- 
stead was loved by men of letters chained to the 
neighbourhood of the town. 

Steele's cottage was on Haverstock Hill, just 
opposite " The Load of Hay," and within easy 
walking distance of ^' The Upper Flask," " The 
Bull and Bush," "The Spaniards," and the 
other taverns of the Heath. Here he came to 
work, but doubtless often found that " the sun 
was on the other side of the road," and stepped 

229 



230 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

over to '^ The Load of Hay." Or perhaps he 
made the pot-boy of the inn carry the sunlight 
over to him in a pewter tankard. Here he lived, 
like the untidy, pleasant creature that he was, 
half gentleman and Captain of the Guards, half 
just jolly humanity, the friend of all the world. 
He was more often Dick than Captain Steele. 

Up Haverstock Hill on summer days came as 
many of the ^' thirty-nine noblemen and gentle- 
men, zealously attached to the Protestant suc- 
cession of the House of Hanover," as thought it 
worth their while to journey out from town to 
the meetings of the Kit Cat Club at " The Up- 
per Flask." There would be Addison, sure to 
call for the better half of the Spectator on the 
way. Or if not Addison, then another of them 
would find Steele, doubtless pretending to be 
busy,, but really waiting eagerly for the call that 
would persuade him from his labours. Then, at 
" The Upper Flask," they would drink, and per- 
haps sing, and certainly talk, as they sat under a 
mulberry tree enjoying the fresh air and each 
other's society. 

" The Spaniards " inn, too, has its history. 
Goldsmith met there with his less reputable 
friends, the friends with whom he could 
" rattle away carelessly," without dread of 
Doctor Johnson's conversational bludgeon. 
And in later times it shared with " Jack 
Straw's Castle " the affections of Dickens, 



OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 231 

who gave Mrs. Bardell an afternoon there with 
her friends, the afternoon that was so cruelly 
interrupted by the terrors of the law. Dickens 
wrote to Forster in 1837: "You don't feel dis- 
posed, do you, to muffle yourself up, and start 
off with me for a good brisk walk over Hamp- 
stead Heath? I knows a good 'ouse there where 
we can have a red-hot chop for dinner, and a 
glass of good wine." It is easy to picture them 
at it, and the taste for red-hot chops continues 
still, and often in the summer twos and threes go 
up to walk the Heath and feed at one or other 
of its inns, and still there are clubs that meet to 
chatter at " The Spaniards " or " The Bull and 
Bush." 

Lamb knew the Heath; sorrowfully upon 
occasion, when he walked hand in hand with 
his sister, taking her to the asylum at 
Finchley when her old mania showed any 
sign of an outbreak; merrily enough though at 
Leigh Hunt's, and quite pleasantly by himself: 

" I do not remember a more whimsical sur- 
prise than having been once detected — by a 
familiar damsel — reclined at my ease upon the 
grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera) reading 
* Pamela.' There was nothing in the book to 
make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; 
but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed 
determined to read in company, I could have 
wished it had been — any other book. We read 



232 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

on very sociably for a few pages ; and, not find- 
ing the author much to her taste, she got up, and 
• — went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee 
to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was 
one between us) was the property of the nymph 
or the swain in this dilemma. From me you 
shall never get the secret." 

Leigh Hunt had " a little packing-case of a 
cottage " in the Vale of Health. There never 
was such a man for illustrating his own charac- 
ter. When he was in prison he decorated his 
room with painted roses; and see how he shows 
his pride in the very cottaginess of his cottage. 
*^ I defy you," says he, " to have lived in a 
smaller cottage than I have done. Yet," he con- 
tinues, " it has held Shelley, and Keats, and half 
a dozen friends in it at once." There is a good 
deal of Leigh Hunt in those two sentences. He 
loved to retire there to work, out of the bustle 
of London; and there were spent the evenings 
that Shelley remembered in Italy, in the little 
room that Keats describes : 

" the chimes 

Of friendly voices had just given place 
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace 
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease. 
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys 
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung 
The glorious features of the bards who sung 
In other ages — cold and sacred busts 
Smiled at each other , , , ♦ . 



OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 233 

Sappho's meek head was there half smiling down 
At nothing; just as though the earnest frown 
Of over thinking had that moment gone 
From off her brow, and left her all alone. 

" Great Alfred's, too, with anxious pitying eyes, 
As If he always listened to the sighs 
Of the goaded world ; and Kosciusko's worn 
By horrid suff'rance — mightily forlorn. 

" Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green, 
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean 
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they! 
For over them was seen a fair display 
Of outspread wings, and from between them shone 
The face of Poesy: from ofiE her throne 
She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell. 
The very sense of where I was might well 
Keep Sleep aloof : but more than that, there came 
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame 
Within my breast ; so that the morning light 
Surprised me even from a sleepless night ; 
And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay. 
Resolving to begin that very day 
These lines ; and howsoever they be done, 
I leave them as a father does his son." 

Hazlitt came here to listen to Leigh Hunt 
" running on and talking about himself at his 
own fireside." Hazlitt thought Hunt a " de- 
lightful coxcomb," and doubtless told him so. 
" Mr. Hunt ought to have been a gentleman 
born, and to have patronised men of letters. He 
might then have played, and sung, and laughed, 
and talked his life away." 



234 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

All that set of men loved the Heath. Leigh 
Hunt found it an admirable place for studying 
Italian landscapes; Shelley used to run about it 
in the dark, leaping over the bushes, and shout- 
ing like an exuberant imp let out in upper air. 
Coleridge finished his life out at Highgate, on 
the other side ; and Keats bought the Heath for 
himself by right of song. Here he w^rote the 
" Ode to a Nightingale," and he lived at one 
time in Well Walk, lodging v^ith a postman, 
and at another in John Street, where he v^as next 
door to Fanny Brawne. From the time of the 
Kit Cats the place has never been without its 
writers; and as for painters — Romney, Col- 
lins, Linnell, Constable, Madox Brown, Kate 
Greenaway: need the list be continued fur- 
ther? 

To-day things are different. Hampstead is 
no longer a fashionable watering-place some 
way out of London ; it is within half an hour of 
the middle of the town. It has suffered from its 
own reputation, and become a stronghold of the 
" literary life," which is a very different thing 
from the honest, hardworking existence of men 
like Hunt or Keats. It is the home of people 
who have had trivial successes, and live on in 
the sequestered happiness of forgotten celebri- 
ties, and of the people who have been able to 
spend their lives playing admirably at art or 
literature. Painters who can no longer paint, 



OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 235 
poets whose fame has penetrated the suburban 
wildernesses and become no more than notoriety 
journalists who have never had their day all 
live here together, a curious, "-"^^l I'^J^^^;^ 
fragile puppets in a toy theatre. The place has 
the feeling of a half-way house between this 
world and the next. . 

Its convention of unconventionality too 
rigid for Bohemia. Everyone is congratulat- 
ig everyone on being so different from every- 
on^e else.' No one is content to l^ve f ^ife h 
made them and as they are. Indeed there 
Ztld be no chapter about the place mth^s book 
if it were not that young writers and painters 
oft:: get their first queer fo-taste«f repu- 
tation in the Hampstead ^^l^^^; /^^ ^V! 
competition among the wives «f ^^e elde y 
critics and the elderly minor poet who wish 
to make their houses centres of intellectual life 
CO lect the most youthful spedmenso genius 
and to hear, as from the mouths of babes and 
sucklings, the meanings and messages of the 
newer movements." A dozen charming middle- 
aged women struggle, with the aid of Messr^ 
Liberty and a painful expenditure of taste to 
turn their drawing-rooms into salons And a 
voung man cannot be long in the life of the 
Tdios or the reviews without being introduced 

^'S: the' Hempstead salon. Imagine a room 



236 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

papered in delicate green, with white mouldings 
dividing the walls and white paint along the 
cornices, and a fringe of Hobbema trees run- 
ning round below the ceiling. The room has 
half a dozen nooks and corners, and in each 
corner, seated on cushions, are a young man 
with long hair and flowing tie, and a maiden 
out of a Burne-Jones picture, reading poetry, 
listening to the talk or to the music made by a 
youthful Paderewski at the piano. The hostess 
will be draped in green or brown, to tone with 
the wall-papers, and she will talk anxiously with 
one or another young man, thinking all the time 
about the intellectual level of the conversation 
and the balance of her sentences. And the talk? 
In the corners of the room it will be of poetry, 
or ideals in art or politics; but through all will 
run a deeper, more serious note. Some cause, 
some movement, some great and vital matter 
will stir the whole salon. For Hampstead has 
always her causes, forsaken one by one as some 
new Pied Piper carries the ladies after him. A 
man will address the hostess and shake his fist, 
and talk of Ireland, and the brutality of English 
rule; of the deplorable condition of the Russian 
peasants; of the open shame of the Ipecacuanha 
Indians, who prefer tattoo to decent clothing. 
" Shall these things be? " he asks. " What, tell 
me, is to become of liberty, of humanity, of civ- 
ilisation, if Hampstead pass by on the other side 



OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 237 

of the way? " What indeed? Several commit- 
tees will be formed at once. 

I have a tenderness for the people in the 
corners; with them lies hope. It is not their 
fault if they have been brought up in the mas- 
querade; nor are they much to blame if they 
have mistaken its doors (with imitation old 
English latches) for the gates of the promised 
land where convention is no more, and art and 
poetry flourish together like birds in the dawn. 
A salmon-coloured tie may really help a young 
poet to be himself; it only becomes abhorrent 
when it is put on as a fashionable affectation. 
Long and matted hair is quite intelligibly worn 
by the young men who are mad to " return to 
the primitive emotions of healthy barbaric life " 
(I quote from a Hampstead conversation). It 
is certainly entertaining to watch the chase of 
barbaric emotion in a Hampstead drawing- 
room — but we can be grateful for amusement. 
And if we ask for seriousness of purpose — it was 
one of these Hampstead poets who wrote on his 
birthday: "Eighteen to-day . . . And 
NOTHING done!" You cannot have anything 
much more serious than that. 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 




A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 

A SCULPTOR and a painter girl fell 
in love with each other, and, as they 
had neither money nor prospect of 
getting any, had nothing to wait for, 
and so got married at once. A cousin of the 
sculptor, not knowing what was on foot, unex- 
pectedly ordered a bust, and paid him twenty 
pounds: with so much opulence, they decided 
to spend their honeymoon in the Latin Quarter. 
We were very fond of them both, and held 
a consultation on the matter. Was it right, 
was it fitting, we asked, that these two should 
be married and have no wedding party? 
Let us uphold the honour of the arts, and 
give them a send-off. Things were very well 
with some of us, and we were sure of a couple 
of sovereigns, so four of us set off through the 
back streets of Bloomsbury to a small French 
restaurant that had always held us welcome. 

"A wedding party?" asked madame of the 
restaurant. " And who of you is to be 
married? Monsieur the sculptor — quel brave 
gargon — and the mademoiselle si petite, si jolie." 

241 



242 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

She was delighted, and promised us the upstairs 
room to ourselves, and said she would do her 
best for us. We separated, to whip up the 
guests, collect the money, buy some roses in 
Covent Garden, and borrow a famous and gi- 
gantic loving-cup that has taken its part in a 
dozen celebrations. We bought a modelling 
tool and a huge cheap paint brush, and decor- 
ated them with ribbons. 

Our party met that evening at the Mad Club, 
twelve men and women, determined on enjoy- 
ment. The sculptor, who had shaved his beard 
for the blessed occasion, arrived last, with the 
little painter girl. He was twenty-two, and she 
nineteen, and we greeted them with cheers. 
Then, delighting in the envy of the rest of the 
Club, who had not been invited, and had the 
bad taste to laugh at our enthusiasm, we set off 
in procession. A sturdy fellow with an accor- 
dion, which he had promised not to play in the 
streets, marched in front, side by side with our 
principal poet, who had composed a wedding 
ode. Then came the bride and bridegroom; 
then three girls, two students, and a model, with 
their attendant men; and lastly a big fat Scotch 
writer of humorous stories, and me with a 
penny whistle. Our satisfaction with ourselves 
was sublime, and showed itself, in spite of the 
prohibition, in spasms of melody on the way. 
We walked merrily, shouting jokes from rank 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 243 

to rank, up Long Acre, across Holborn, and 
then to the right from Southampton Row, until 
we reached the restaurant. 

When we turned the last corner, we saw, far 
away at the other end of the grey street, the black 




and white figure of a waiter standing expectant 
in the middle of the road. At the sight of our 
procession he hurriedly disappeared, and when 
we reached the door madame in person, big. 



244 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

red-cheeked, blue-bloused, white-aproned, was 
standing smiling on the threshold. 

The sculptor turned timorously to the rear 
ranks. " She does not know which of us it is? " 
he whispered, with fear in his voice. But she 
enlightened him herself. 

" Ah, Monsieur et Madame," she cried, 
breaking into the midst of us, and seizing the 
hands of the bride and bridegroom. " You 
have the best of my wishes for the happy mar- 
ried life, the dear love, and the large family. 
Your little wife, is she not so charming, so 
beautiful? . . . Your husband, ce bon gar- 
gon, is he not so well-set-up? All is ready," she 
laughed a welcome to the rest of us: " the wine 
has come, and the bouillon is hot; it is Mon- 
sieur's favourite bouillon," she added, turning 
again to the sculptor, " and for Madame I have 
made a salade with my own hands. . . . Ah, 
the happy married life. Monsieur et Ma- 
dame." 

Upstairs madame had kept her promises. 
Bottles ranged down the table, and the red and 
white roses made a rare show. A paper crown, 
looked upon lovingly by the Frenchwoman as 
her own work, folded and frizzed like the 
decoration to a tart, lay on the plate of the bride, 
and a huge cigar, a present from madame's 
husband, lay on the plate of the bridegroom. 
The paint brush and the modelling tool, gay 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 245 

with ribbons, lay crossed between them. Corks 
flew from bottles with a joyous crackling. 
Madame stood in the doorway, her hands on 
her hips, shouting joyfully to the waiter to be 
quick with the bouillon, which presently came 
up in a vast tureen. She sent the waiter 
packing down again, to bring up her shy red 
husband, made him shake hands with the lot 
of us, and then remained after he had escaped, 
to hear the sculptor, in a nervous, efflorescent 
speech, acknowledge the gifts of crown and 
cigar and the effective symbolism of the paint 
brush and the moulder. 

Indeed, she could not find it in her heart to 
leave us. She waited on us, bullying the 
waiter out of the jollity of her heart, and ad- 
dressing remarks all the time to " Monsieur et 
Madame," a huge smile expressing her own 
satisfaction, and a crimson face the confusion 
of the little painter girl, while the sculptor 
pretended not to mind. The soup was served, 
and the waiter vanished regretfully, as the rest 
of the meal was to be cold, and we had agreed 
to help ourselves . . . Surely she was going. 
No. " Pardon, Monsieur et Madame," she 
beamed in the faces of the uncomfortable two, 
and rearranged their knives and forks. Again 
she tried to go, again was overcome by the fasci- 
nation of the newly married. ^' Que je suis 
imbecile," — she shuffled back and altered the 



246 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

position of the flowers in the middle of the table. 
" Oh, Monsieur et Madame," she murmured, 
smiling with as matronly an enjoyment as if the 
pretty little painter had been one of her own 
stout daughters. Suddenly the sculptor's self- 
possession left him. He put down his spoon, 
and fairly loosed himself in laughter, and the 
good woman, enjoying but not in the least un- 
derstanding the joke, threw her head back and 
laughed uproariously with him. Someone 
lifted the loving-cup. " Yes, yes! " we shouted. 
" To the health of Monsieur et Madame ! " " To 
Monsieur et Madame!" she said with fervour, 
and holding the great bowl between her fat 
jewelled hands, she drank. How we laughed. 
She set the loving-cup on the table, and, sud- 
denly bending over, kissed the little bride on 
the forehead. How we cheered. Then at last 
she went out. " Oh, Monsieur et Madame," we 
heard her gurgle as she closed the door. 

That set the dinner going gaily. The food 
disappeared, and the beer, and the wine. We 
made speeches; we sang; the poet recited his 
ode; we made the little bride put on her paper 
crown, and compelled her husband to smoke 
his gigantic cigar; the loving-cup passed round 
twice, and then could go round no more except 
as the emblem of a vanished joy. There was 
a piano in a corner of the room, and when we 
left the table we did a little dancing; the man 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 247 

with the accordion used it well, the penny 
whistle sounded, and one of the bridesmaids, 
who was an art student, sat at the piano with 
a painter, to play a ten-finger duet, their spare 
hands clasped about each other's waists. At 
half-past ten we begin to be thirsty again with 
our merriment, and there was no wine or indeed 
drink of any kind in the place, for the restaurant 
had no licence. The street door had been shut 
a quarter of an hour before. We had to draw 
lots as to who should go out to replenish the 
canteen. Two were to go — the one to see, as 
somebody impertinently suggested, that none of 
the precious liquor was drunk upon the way — 
and the lot fell on the fat story-writer and me. 
The others were to let us in from the street, as 
soon as they heard us knock. 

Ideals cause a great deal of discomfort. 
There was really no need for us to have any; 
we could have been contented with wine — but 
our ideal was creme de menthe. In other parts 
of the town you have but to ask for creme de 
menthe to see it handed over the counter; but 
here it was a different matter. We got our 
dozen of cheap bad claret with ease, and bor- 
rowed a basket to carry it in ; but we went to at 
least eight little shops in those back streets before 
we found a man who had ever heard of the 
liqueur. At last we found a spirit-shop with a 
very intelligent proprietor, whose intelligence 



248 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

we welcomed, that afterwards we had cause to 
curse. 

" Creme de menthe," he said; "is not that 
the same as essence of peppermint? '* 

" Yes, surely." We had heard something of 
the sort. " Anyhow, it is always sold in narrow 
bottles." 

The man went downstairs behind the counter, 
and we heard him strike a match and move 
about in the cellar under our feet. Presently 
he came up with two very big bottles. 

" At least these are the right shape." 

We bought them, and, laden with our pur- 
chases, set off eagerly back to the restaurant. 

All the lights were out below stairs, and the 
blinds were down in the windows of the room 
our party were enjoying. The accordion was 
going merrily, and several voices were singing 
different songs. We banged and thundered on 
the door, but they were making too much noise 
for anybody in the house to hear us. Standing 
well back from the pavement, I began to throw 
pennies at the lighted windows. The first penny 
touched the cornice, fell in the gutter, and 
rolled away irretrievably in the darkness of the 
street. The second hit the sill, and dropped 
through the grating into the basement. The 
third, the fourth followed its example. There 
was no other missile left but my latchkey. The 
other fellow had nothing at all. 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 249 

" You'll have to make a good shot, and smash 
the window, or else you'll lose the key. We'll 
make those deaf idiots share the expense." 

I took a step back, and a deliberate aim, and 
then let fly. There was a crash of falling glass 
as the latchkey fell inside the room. The music 
stopped, the blind was pulled aside, and half a 
dozen of the rogues trooped downstairs, let us 
in with cheerful apologies, and took the claret 
bottles from the basket as we carried it up. 

The creme de menthe, the prize of the 
evening, was to be kept to the end, and we gave 
ourselves up gladly to singing, and drinking the 
claret. It had been found that the poet's rather 
solemn epithalamium fitted admirably to a pop- 
ular music-hall tune; it was rendered with 
energy, and such success that even the poet, in- 
clined to be unhappy at first, at last joined in 
good-temperedly, and sang as loudly as the rest. 
It was very late when we took the first of those 
long bottles, opened it with elaborate ostenta- 
tion, and poured a green liquid into the enipty 
wine-glasses. Thank goodness, it was the right 
colour. 

" Health 1" cried the sculptor, "to the two 
brave fellows who gave their all (for did they 
not leave us, and is not merriment such as ours 
the sum of human joy) to bring us this liqueur. 
Gentlemen, brother artists, your very good 
health!" 



250 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

The glasses, shimmering with dark green, 
were lifted, and ten happy men and women 
drank to our prosperity. I have seldom seen 
ten faces flash with such perfect unanimity from 
exultation to dismay. Their mouths screwed 
up. Their eyes blinked. They put the glasses 
unsteadily down. 

" You two fellows had better drink our 
healths now," was the sculptor's only comment, 
as he set his glass on the mantelpiece, with the 
tears in his eyes, and wrinkles round his mouth 
as if he had been drinking lemon juice. 

We sipped gingerly, walked to the window, 
and hurled the bottles that had cost so much to 
sudden chaos on the opposite pavement. So 
much for ideals. 

Just then the big French lady opened the 
door. "It is half-past twelve," she said; "I 
regret much that you must go." She looked 
round the room for the bride, and smiled again 
her prodigious, wonderful smile. "The bill? 
Ah, yes. That is quite right." 

" We have broken a window," said the sculp- 
tor. He had insisted that the window at least 
should be paid for by himself. 

Madame smiled again. " Ah oui. A win- 
dow. It is the youth. One does not get married 
every day. The window shall be my wedding 
gift to Monsieur et Madame." She caught the 
young sculptor, who had unwarily approached 



A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 251 

too near, and kissed him loudly on either cheek. 
I am really happy to record the fact— he kissed 
her in return. 

And so the twelve of us bundled out into the 
street again, half an hour after midnight, leav- 
ing madame waving farewells from the door. 
This time we did not walk in twos and twos. 
Our hearts were high, and needed a more gen- 
eral comradeship. We walked twelve deep, arm 
in arm, along the narrow streets, to the tune, or 
something like the tune, of the " Soldiers' 
Chorus," played bravely on the accordion. It 
was not genteel; it was perhaps a little vulgar; 
but it was tremendously genuine. 

We went to a flat in the Gray's Inn Road that 
was rented by two of the men. As long as the 
wine and the jollity kept us awake we made 
speeches, and sang, and prophesied of the success 
of the sculptor, and told stories without point 
that seemed prodigiously witty. Gradually we 
grew sleepier and sleepier, and at last were all 
asleep, some on the divans, some in chairs, some 
on the floor with heads on cushions or backs 
propped against the wall. . . . We awoke 
only just in time to take the two children, bride 
and bridegroom, to the station, where their lug- 
gage, such as it was, was waiting for them, and 
to see them off, dishevelled, dirty, weary as our- 
selves, in the morning boat train for Paris. 



A NOVELIST 



A NOVELIST 

IT is a joyous day for a young man when one 
of his articles wins him a letter from a 
well-known writer. I walked through 
Bloomsbury with elation, feeling, square 
in my pocket, the note that invited me to call on 
a novelist whose work had given me a paragraph 
in one of my diminutive essays. He was so well 
known that it was a little surprising to find him 
in Bloomsbury at all. Why not in St. John's 
Wood? I asked. Why not in the real country? 
At least, I pictured a very sumptuous flat. 
Through the old streets I walked, through the 
squares of tall old houses once fashionable but 
now infested by landladies, expecting all the 
time, as I neared the street he had mentioned, to 
find more signs of opulence. I found it at last, 
and it was dingy, miserable, more depressing 
than the rest. The novelist lived at No. 7. I 
rang the bell and waited with a fluttering heart. 
Presently the door opened a suspicious six 
inches, and the tousled head of an elderly 
woman in curl-papers showed itself in the open- 
ing. On asking for my novelist, I was told to 
come in, and driven into the usual lodging-house 

255 



256 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dining-room. A huge gilt mirror hung over the 
mantelpiece, faded rhododendrons upside down 
made a grisly pattern on the wall-paper, the 
table was covered with a purple tasselled cloth 
with holes in it, and the furniture was up- 
holstered in a material that had once been pink. 
The curtains drawn across the windows were 
yellow and grey with age and dust, and I could 
not bear to look at the carpet. There were four 
pictures on the walls, portraits of Queen Vic- 
toria and Mr. Gladstone, and two enlarged pho- 
tographs, coloured, and magnificently framed, 
that showed the curl-papered lady who had 
opened the door, dressed in a low-necked even- 
ing gown, with jewels about her fat, creased 
neck, and flowers in her hair. 

The door had been left open, and presently 
she shouted, '^ Go upstairs! First on the left." 
The door of " first on the left'' was ajar, and a 
baby was squalling inside. I knocked, and went 
into the most dishevelled room it is possible to 
imagine. There was a big bed in it, unmade, the 
bed-clothes tumbled anyhow, several broken 
chairs, and a washing-stand with a basin out of 
which someone had taken a bite. The novelist, 
in a dressing-gown open at the neck, and show- 
ing plainly that there was nothing but skin be- 
neath it, was writing at a desk, throwing off his 
sheets as fast as he covered them. A very pretty 
little Irish girl, of about nineteen or twenty, 




THE NOVELIST 



1 



A NOVELIST 257 

picked them up as they fell, and sorted them, 
at the same time doing her best to quiet the baby 
who sprawled all over her, as she sat on the floor. 
They stood up when I came in, and the novelist 
tried to apologise for the disorder, but the baby 
howled so loudly that it was impossible to hear 
him. 

"Take it out!" he shouted to the girl, and 
she obediently picked it up and carried it out 
of the room. 

" That was a very good essay of yours, young 
man, and I thank you for it. I scarcely thought 
you would be as young as you are. How young 
are you? " 

I told him. 

" Fortunate fellow. Old enough for wine, 
and too young for liqueurs. The best of all 
ages. I hope you thank Jupiter every morning 
for your youth. Ah me, what it is to be young! 
I was a strapping fellow when I was as young as 
you. And now! Oh, you fortunate young 
dog!" He thumped his broad chest, that was 
covered with thick black hair, as I could see, 
for the dressing gown had fallen partly open. 
His big eyes twinkled under their strong dark 
brows, and he suddenly buried a huge unwashen 
hand in his curly black hair. 

" Aha! You are thinking that it is not worth 
while to be a success, if this is all it leads to. 
Eh! What? Yes. I am right. I can always 



258 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

tell. That is the curse of it. Look at my wife, 
for example. She loves me. Yes. But she does 
not guess that I know she looks upon me as a 
big bull baby, very queer and mad, but so strong 
that it has to be humoured. In fact, when she 
carried off that vociferous little Victor Hugo, 
she was only looking upon you as a lamb offered 
providentially for sacrifice in place of Isaac. 
She is always afraid I shall throw Victor Hugo 
out of the window. It is very annoying to know 
that she feels like that. Funny woman. Pretty, 
don't you think? But what about that wine? If 
you go and shout ^ Mrs. Gatchl' at the top of 
that staircase, the she-dragon who runs this 
place will come and bring up a bottle of some- 
thing or other. I would shout myself, but you 
are younger than I." 

I crossed the landing and shouted for Mrs. 
Gatch. Presently she stood below me in the 
narrow hall. 

" Well, and what is it? " she asked crossly. 

I was just going to reply, when the voice of 
the novelist bellowed from his room, like the 
voice of one of the winds of God. 

" Mrs. Gatch, you are a bad-tempered 
woman. Don't deny it. Bring me a bottle of 
the best bad burgundy you have in the filthy 
cellar." 

It was clear that Mrs. Gatch was frightened 
of him, for she brought the bottle at once, 



A NOVELIST 259 

wiping it on her apron as she came into the 
room. We drank out of a couple of glasses my 
great man brought from a box in the corner. 
Then he talked of literature, and so well that 
the untidy bed, the unclean room, the wife and 
the baby were as if they never had been. In 
spite of his unwashen hands, in spite of the dress- 
ing-gown, he won his way back to greatness. He 
lifted the tumbler magnificently to watch the 
ruby of the wine, while he talked of Edgar 
Allan Poe, and of his methods, and of that won- 
derful article on the principles of composition. 
Poe was profound, he said, to have imagined 
that article, but the article represented him pro- 
founder than he really was. From Poe we came 
to detective and mystery tales, Gaboriau, Sher- 
lock Holmes, and the analytical attitude, and 
so to the relations between criticism and art. It 
was a most opulent conversation. 

I sat on a three-legged chair wnere I could 
see out of the window, and presently noticed 
the novelist's wife walking up and down on the 
opposite pavement, carrying the child and a 
blue parasol. She had not troubled to put on a 
hat, and she was evidently waiting till we had 
done our talk. It was clear that they had no 
other room. And so, regretfully, calculating a 
time that would leave her at the top of the street, 
while I escaped at the bottom, not wishing to 
put her to confusion, I told the novelist of an 



26o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

appointment with my editor, shook hands with 
him, was pressed to come again, ran downstairs, 
and walked away up the street. I walked 
quickly away, but not so quickly that I did not 
see the little woman hurry back into the house 
with Victor Hugo, to resume, doubtless, her oc- 
cupation of sorting the pages of deathless prose 
that her " big bull baby " dropped from his 
desk. 

I saw him more than once there later, and 
always the room was in the same condition, the 
child howling, the wife pretty, untidy as ever, 
the great man unwashed but working. How he 
could work! Sheet after sheet used to drop 
from his desk. Sometimes when I called upon 
him he would be in the middle of a chapter, and 
then he would ask me to sit down and smoke, 
while his pen whirled imperturbably to the end. 
He could write in any noise, and he could throw 
off his work completely as soon as the pen was 
out of his hand. He was quite contented in the 
lodging-house, living with wife and child in a 
single room. He seemed more amused than an- 
noyed by its inconveniences. " After all," he 
would say, " I have to pretend to superb intel- 
lect, and the pretence would be exposed at once 
if I let such things worry me." 

One day I had a post-card from him, saying 



A NOVELIST 261 

he was going abroad. I did not hear from him 
again for several years, when a letter that came 
in a crested envelope told me he was settled in 
a flat. Would I come to dinner? 

He was in Bloomsbury again, but the flat 
was more comfortable than the room. It was 
very decently furnished, and quite clean. A 
book of his, that had had a great success in 
America, was the explanation of his magnifi- 
cence. The door was opened by an elderly 
housekeeper, and I was ushered into his study 
with considerable ceremony. 

He rose to greet me, but sat down again at 
once, and said that he was very ill. 

I said I was sorry to hear it. 

"Damn you, young man! You can afford 
to be. Look at you, you young bullock, and 
then look at me — a miserable wreck." 

He lay back in his chair, with his black hair 
crisp and curly, his cheeks red and healthy, and 
his heavy black eyebrows stiff and strong over 
his active eyes. He was dressed, except that he 
had not a collar, and the muscles of his throat 
were as fine and beautiful as those of a statue. 
I could not think of him as ill. 

But from time to time he reached languidly 
to the table, and took a tumbler of yellow 
opaque liquid, from which he drank a little, 
and then, after making a wry face, put the 
tumbler back. 



262 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Presently he explained. '' Have you heard," 
said he, " that a great doctor, a man called 
Verkerrsen, has been investigating the long 
life of the Hungarians, and attributes it to the 
quantities of sour milk that they drink? " 

I had not heard. 

"Yes," he v^ent on. "The whole matter is 
explained in an article in the Medical JournaL 
You had better read it." He took a sip from 
the tumbler, and made a horrible grimace. 
" Ugh!" he said, "but I think the Hungarian 
sour milk must be nicer than the sour milk of 
London. Ugh! Disgusting. But I must take 
it, I suppose." 

He loved theories above everything else, and 
went on sipping heroically till he finished the 
glass. Then he jumped to his feet, and arched 
his biceps, and smote proudly on his chest. 
" Ah! " he cried, " it was worth it. I feel bet- 
ter already. Let's have supper." 

Supper was brought in, admirably cooked, 
and laid on the study table. We sat down to 
it with the elderly housekeeper. The novelist, 
restored by sour milk to ebullient health, was 
as happy as could be, joking now with her, now 
with me, talking most joyfully. Something 
crossed his mind, when he was half way through 
his soup, but it was no more than the shadow of 
a bird flying over a flower-bed in the sunlight. 
He bent towards me. " I say," he said, " my 



A NOVELIST 263 

wife is dying in Dublin this week. Pass the 
toast." 

I did not know what to reply. But there was 
no need, for he had passed on instantaneously 
to a new ingenious notion of his, that everything 
was a brain, that molecules were brains, that 
we were aggregations of tiny brains, that the 
world was a huge brain with us as parasites upon 
it, and that the universe, made up of brains, was 
nothing but a mighty brain itself. He could 
think of nothing else till supper was done. 

Then, when the housekeeper had cleared 
away the supper things, he went to the cupboard 
and pulled out two long narrow stands, each 
holding a dozen liqueur glasses. " My own 
idea," he explained, and proceeded to place 
upon the table one by one a dozen different 
bottles of liqueurs — Chartreuse, Benedictine, 
creme de menthe, anisette, cherry brandy, 
and several with fantastic names of his own in- 
vention. " Let us drink each liqueur to a differ- 
ent genius," he said. " Chartreuse for Alexan- 
dre mon cher Dumas, Benedictine for the noble 
Balzac, cherry brandy for Fielding, anisette 
for Sterne, creme de menthe — dull stuff, 
creme de menthe; we'll drink creme de 
menthe; to — to — to Samuel Richardson. He'd 
have thought it so naughty." 

There was a curious point about this man. 
He loved the bravery and show of conviviality. 



264 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

but he was not a Hans Breitmann to " solfe der 
infinide in von edernal shpree." He never got 
" dipsy," and he hated drunkenness above all 
other vices. The only time we quarrelled was 
when, hearing that I was going to see him, an- 
other man whom I scarcely knew forced him- 
self upon me, and had to be introduced. The 
great man plied him with liqueurs till he fell 
on the floor, and quarrelled with me for six 
months because he had to help to carry the 
fellow to his lodgings. 

I should like to see him again, but Blooms- 
bury has been the poorer for some time, being 
without him. I think he is in France. I never 
dared ask if the wife lived or died. It would 
have been so difficult to find the correct manner. 
Something like this, I suppose : ^' By the way, 
that wife of yours; underground or not? Pass 
the cigarettes." 



A PAINTER 



A PAINTER 

THE painter had a studio made of two 
rooms, one, long and dark, opening 
into the other, which was larger, but 
kept in a perpetual twilight by shades 
over the window. The walls were covered with 
dark green curtains, and on them were hung 
weird, fiery-coloured pictures, compositions for 
Oriental dreams: two peris caressing a peacock 
by a golden fountain; a girl in crimson and gold 
holding fantastic wine-glasses towards the 
shadow of a man ; a sketch in pastels of a pair of 
struggling gods. All round the floor, leaning up 
against the walls, were unfinished canvases, half 
realised dreams that had not the energy to get 
themselves expressed before they were forgotten, 
and other dreams, to be abandoned in their turn, 
were striving for the light. There was an old 
piano in a corner, and a sofa, a dark wood table, 
and some ebony chairs. 

He was a small man, with hair not long, but 
very curly, beautiful eyes, and a little mous- 
tache. He dressed neatly, though he had less 
money for the purpose than most of the other 
artists in the building. He worked entirely 

267 



268 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

alone, and laughed quietly at the anxiety of 
people who wished to succeed, to exhibit, to be 
publicly recognised as painters, unless he under- 
stood that they looked upon success only as guar- 
antee of bread and butter. He could understand 
that people might, without degradation, work 
for bread and butter, and he always said he was 
willing to do so himself. But he never did. 
Chances came to him, as they come to every- 
body; but either the would-be purchaser was not 
appreciative, or he chose the wrong things to 
commend. The painter could never have slept 
with the thought that one of his pictures, an ar- 
rangement in colours, was in the house of a gold- 
watch-chained plutocrat who loved it for the 
sake of a story he had happened to read into it. 
He would have counted the picture as wasted, 
and would not have let it go to such a man, even 
if the money would have saved him from 
starvation. 

There were only two very small exhibitions 
where he felt he could show his pictures with 
a free conscience, and he had a painting in each 
every year; and yet, though he had the year in 
which to paint them, his two pictures always 
went down unfinished. He used to paint on, 
dream after dream, imagining that each one was 
to be the annual masterpiece, and then, before 
any one of them was done, he would be started 
on another, until, a week before the exhibitions, 



A PAINTER 269 

he would find that he had not a single picture in 
such a state that he could expose it without 
shame to the eyes of other painters. Then he 
used to work furiously, first on one picture, then 
on another, now on the first again, until at the 
end of the week, almost in tears, he would send 
off the least unfinished of the lot, and, shutting 
himself up in his studio, refuse to allow anyone 
to interrupt his self-accusation and remorse. 

He called on me in my first lodging, and 
found me trying to play " Summer is icumen 
in " on an old wooden flageolet. But, although 
he was a musician, he asked me to come to his 
studio, to see his piano, which, very old, was a 
perfect instrument for the older music, Scar- 
latti, Corelli, and the Elizabethan songs. Very 
often after that he would play for hours in 
that dim room, while I listened, sitting and 
smoking over the fire. Sometimes another man 
used to come in and play the piano for him, so 
that he was free for the 'cello, that he handled 
with the love that is the greater part of skill. 
One winter we made friends with a model who 
had a violin. Then we used to keep Tuesday 
nights free for concerts: there would be the 
pianist, the artist round the corner in the large 
room playing the 'cello, and the pretty, fluttered 
little girl playing the violin in the long room by 
the fire, while I sat on the sofa and tried to keep 
time (for they could not see each other) by beat- 



2 70 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

ing my foot on the floor. Sometimes all three 
would be together, and they were never more 
than two bars apart, and the caretaker who lived 
below the stairs used to thank us solemnly each 
night for the sweet music that we made. The 
painter made a sketch of her, the only humorous 
drawing he ever did, showing her seated in her 
chair, with her glasses in her lap, her hands 
clasped, her eyes turned up to the ceiling, en- 
tranced as if by the melody from heaven. 

When we were tired of the music, the little 
model used to take the kettle from the cupboard, 
and make cofifee for us, with a very pretty as- 
sumption of housewifeliness and motherhood. 
Then, after the coffee, we would talk, and the 
painter used to sing old songs, or more often 
would sit content by the fire, watching the fire- 
light bring out strange colours in the unrealised 
dreams that waited on the canvases against the 
wall. 

His was a simple, earnest life, of a kind that 
is not so rare as books about studio life would 
make out. There are many like him, who care 
more for art than for recognition, and work on 
quietly, happily, living on bread and cheese, or 
going without it when painting materials be- 
come a more insistent necessity. Since those 
days he has become a success in spite of himself. 
Some illustrations he made to fairy tales inter- 
ested people, and though he fled them when he 



i 



A PAINTER 271 

could, and only asked to be left alone, he has 
become famous and almost opulent. But he 
lives as simply as before, and paints in the same 
manner. His pictures are all wonderful, but his 
patrons find it as difficult to get him to finish one 
as it is to persuade him to let it leave his studio 
when done. In the Middle Ages he would have 
been a monk and a painter of frescoes, loved by 
all the gentle-minded folk who came to worship 
in the church where his dreams were painted on 
the walls. Now, except among the few who 
know him well, the best word I hear said of him 
is that he is a good artist, but a criminally un- 
businesslike man. 



A GIPSY POET 



A GIPSY POET 



NO one knew whence he had come. 
Only, he had stood one day, a slight, 
black-haired, black-eyed boy, on the 
doorstep of a publisher's office, shy 
to enter or to retreat, with a little manuscript 
volume of poems in his hand. By some chance 
the publisher himself happened to come out on 
his way to lunch, and asked what the lad did, 
waiting there on his threshold. On hearing the 
boy's reply, and glancing for a moment through 
the volume that was timidly held out to him, he 
took him to his club, gave him a good lunch, and 
asked a number of questions. He confessed 
afterwards that he had learned nothing except 
what could be seen at once, that the boy was of 
an odd kind. Of what kind he decided as soon 
as he had read the poems. 

In a month's time the little book was pub- 
lished, and the grace, the finish, the freshness 
of the songs in it ensured at least a critical suc- 
cess. There was something in this little book 
that had not been written before, something of 
the open road seen from other eyes than those 
of townsman or the ordinary country poet. 1 he 



2 76 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

phrases were not those of the casual observer. 
The hedges were real hedges, with blackberries 
in them, or good twigs for burning, or straight 
branches for switches or walking-sticks. The 
dark nights were not made in theatres, but were 
bad for travellers, good for thieves. Men and 
women were men and women of the open air. 
There was something in every poem in the book 
that had the real blood and spirit of the country, 
something that made the book different from 
every other volume of the season. It was praised 
in half a dozen of the best papers, and the pub- 
lisher, proud of his little romance, gave dinner 
parties, inviting distinguished guests to meet his 
poet. 

Before the interest in him that the book had 
caused had died away, someone, more practical 
and more benevolent than most admirers of 
young poets, had got the boy permanent work as 
librarian of a small library in town. He settled 
in here among the books and students, and 
worked steadily from the autumn of one year to 
the June of the next. He had made other friends 
besides the distinguished people. There were 
several lodgings of poets as young and less for- 
tunate than himself, where he used to come in 
the evenings and read his verses aloud, in an 
effective sing-song way, the manner, so he said, in 
which he composed them. He loved to listen to 
the old stories of Morte d'Arthur and the Mab- 



A GIPSY POET 277 

inogion, that used often to be read aloud in the 
evenings at these lodgings, and there was an 
Indian book called " Old Deccan Days," for 
whose stories of rajah and ranee he would ask 
again and again. Often he would come back 
some days after one of these readings with poems 
in which he had retold the tales and given them 
a fresh significance. For us he was always 
eerie ; there was a motive in his poetry that could 
never be ours, an indefinable spirit of wander- 
ing, and of nights spent in the open or in the 
shadows of the moonlit woods. It was as if a 
goblin were our friend. Nothing that he did or 
said could have surprised us much. 

When that June came, it was after a cold 
May. Winter had lingered later than usual, 
and June came with a sudden warmth and a 
sense of spring as well as of summer. One even- 
ing one of his friends called at the library to 
take him up to Soho to drink red wine, which 
he loved, and to talk and dine in one of the little 
restaurants. The library clerks told him that 
the poet had not been in the place either that 
day or the day before. He had left no message, 
and was not in his rooms. His landlady only 
knew that he had gone out very early in the 
morning two days ago, and had not returned to 
sleep. He had not come back the next day, and 
after that his friends took in turn to call every 
evening. They found it necessary to persuade 



278 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

his landlady that she had no right to sell his 
few possessions. Ten days later, as we were sit- 
ting at dinner at our usual small restaurant in 
Soho, he came in. His clothes were dirty and 
ragged, and his boots were almost worn out. 
He had no money, he said, but he was going to 
the library in the morning, where some was due 
to him. He was skilful in parrying our urgent 
questions, and we scarcely knew if he wished us 
not to know where he had been, or if he were 
ignorant himself. But there was a brighter 
light in his eyes than we had seen since first 
he came among us, and a clear ring in his 
voice. 

For the rest of that year he worked regularly 
in the library, and read and wrote or saw his 
friends in the evenings. Sometimes when we 
were with him in the streets a man or a woman 
would speak to him in an odd tongue. He al- 
ways pretended not to understand them, but we 
noticed that afterwards he contrived to be rid 
of us for the rest of the evening. We knew that 
somehow his life was not ours, but we liked him 
very well. 

In the following May he disappeared again, 
though for a few days only. In June he went, 
and in July, returning each time tired out, 
happy, and secret, an insoluble enigma. There 
began to be troubles for him with the library 
authorities. 



A GIPSY POET 279 

One evening in early August he was in a room 
in Chelsea, drinking and singing old songs. His 
face was flushed, and he was overexcited. The 
songs seemed a relief to him, and he sang one 
after another. At the end of the evening, after 
someone had sung one of the usual English 
songs, he jumped up waving his glass, and sang 
uproariously in a language we none of us under- 
stood. His face was transfigured as he sang, and 
he swayed his whole body with the rhythm of 
his tune. When he had finished singing he 
tossed the wine down his throat, looked queerly 
at us, and then laughed to himself and sat sud- 
denly down. 

Afterwards two of his friends walked with 
him to the Embankment, as he lived at that time 
in lodgings on the south side of the river. Just 
as they turned up over Battersea Bridge, a man 
and a woman stepped across the road and waited 
in the lamplight. The man had a cap over his 
eyes, and a loose necktie. He was very straight, 
and walked more easily than a loafer. The 
woman had a scarlet shawl. As the three of 
them went by, the poet humming a tune for the 
others to hear, the woman touched his arm, and 
he looked round into her face. 

" Good-night, you fellows," he said to the two 
who were with him, shook hands with them, 
which was not his usual custom, and left them, 
and went off with that strange couple. They 



2 8o BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

stood looking after him in surprise, but he did 
not turn. 

He disappeared from Bohemia as mysteri- 
ously as he came. That was four years ago, and 
not one of us has seen him since that night. Per- 
haps he will walk in again, with his boots worn 
out and happiness alight in his face. Perhaps 
he is dead. Perhaps he is wandering with his 
own people along the country roads. 



CONCLUSION 



CONCLUSION 

CRABBE wrote to Edmund Burke in 
1781 : " I am one of those outcasts on 
the world, who are without a friend, 
without employment, and without 
bread. I had a partial father, who gave me a 
better education than his broken fortune would 
have allowed, and a better than was necessary, as 
he could give me that only. ... In April, last, 
I came to London with three pounds, and flat- 
tered myself this would be sufficient to supply me 
with the common necessaries of life till my abili- 
ties should procure me more; of these I had the 
highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contrib- 
uted to my delusion. I knew little of the world, 
and had read books only; I wrote, and fancied 
perfection in my compositions; when I wanted 
bread, they promised me affluence, and soothed 
me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appear- 
ance subjected me to contempt. Time, reflec- 
tion, and want have shown me my mistake. 

In 1 8 17 he wrote to a young lady: '' You may 
like me very well— but, child of simplicity and 
virtue, how can you let yourself be so deceived? 

283 



284 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

Am I not a great fat rector, living upon a mighty 
income, while my poor curate starves upon the 
scraps that fall from the luxurious table? Do 
I not visit that horrible London, and enter into 
its abominable dissipations? Am I not this day 
going to dine on venison and drink claret? Have 
I not been at election dinners, and joined the 
Babel-confusion of a tov^n hall? Child of sim- 
plicity, am I fit to be a friend to you? . . ." 

Bohemia is only a stage in a man's life, except 
in the case of fools and a very few others. It 
is not a profession. A man does not set out say- 
ing, "I am going to be a Bohemian"; he 
trudges along, whispering to himself, " 1 am 
going to be a poet, or an artist, or some other 
kind of great man," and finds Bohemia, like a 
tavern by the wayside. He may stay there for 
years, and then suddenly take post-horses along 
the road ; he may stay a little time, and then go 
back whence he came, to start again in another 
direction as a Civil Servant, or a respectable 
man of business ; only a very few settle down in 
the tavern, forever postponing their departure, 
until at last they die, old men, still laughing, 
talking, flourishing glasses, and drinking to their 
future prosperity. 

I have tried to show what life is like in this 
tavern on the road to success — this tavern whose 
sign, gaily painted — a medley of paint-brushes, 
pens, inkpots, and palettes, with a tankard or 



CONCLUSION 285 

two in the middle of them — hangs out so invit- 
ingly over the road that no young man can pass 
it without going in at the door. With memories 
of the older times, and pictures of the life of 
to-day, I have done my best to get the spirit of 
it on paper; and it is clear, now that I have 
finished, that there is something left unsaid. I 
have not brought Bohemia into perspective with 
the rest of a man's existence, nor told what hap- 
pens when he comes to leave it. 

For it is not an uninterrupted succession of 
artifices to get hold of daily bread, drinking 
bouts, wedding parties, and visits to the studios 
and lodging of friends — small meaningless pains 
and pleasures. These things are not ends in 
themselves. There is something behind the very 
extravagance of the costumes that we wear. Our 
life, our clothes are different from conventional 
life and fashionable clothes, but they are not 
different from whim or caprice. People do not 
make fools of themselves for the fun of the 
thing, except in France. They never do it in 
Bohemia. The secret of the whole is a need 
for the emphasis and expression of individual- 
ity. When a youth, brought up in ordinary 
family life, feels somehow that he is not quite 
like the others, that he also is one of the prophets, 
the very sign of his vocation is an urgent need 
of marking his differences. He may have an 
overwhelming desire to shock his nearest and 



286 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

dearest relatives — even that is excusable — per- 
haps he will leave "Tom Jones" on his 
mother's drawing-room table. The regularity, 
the routine, the exactness of his homelife will 
be about his neck like a mill-stone, as he strug- 
gles to fly with wings where others walk. He 
will feel, perhaps without admitting it to him- 
self, the horror of being indistinguishable from 
among the rest of the human ants about him, 
and, by growing long hair, and refusing to wear 
a collar, does his best to strengthen, not others 
so much as himself, in believing that his is a 
peculiar species. 

And so, when he goes along the road with 
his manuscripts or his sketchbooks, lonely but 
very hopeful, and sees that gay sign hanging 
out, and, looking into the tavern, catches 
glimpses of a hundred others as extravagant as 
himself, he tells himself with utter joy that here 
are his own people, and, being like everyone else 
a gregarious creature, throws himself through 
the door and into their arms. There are no 
Bohemians in the desert. 

As soon as he is with his own people, dress- 
ing to please himself, and living a life as dif- 
ferent as possible from the one that he has 
known, the whole energy of his need for self- 
expression pours itself without hindrance into 
his art. (Only the wasters lose sight of the end 
in the means, and live the life without thought 



CONCLUSION 287 

of what they set out to gain.) The mad pleas- 
ures of the life, even the discomforts, the pos- 
sible starvation, have their value in being such 
contrasts to the precision of the home he has 
left. Material difficulties, too, matter little to 
him, for his interests are on another plane. He 
can escape from the harassing knowledge that 
his purse contains only twopence-halfpenny in 
the glorious oblivion of painting a picture or 
fitting exact words to an emotion. He has al- 
ways a temple in his mind which the winds of 
trouble do not enter, and where he may worship 
before a secret altar a flame that burns more 
steadily and brighter with every offering he lays 
before it. More practical things disturb him 
very little — do you remember Hazlitt's saying, 
when he and John Lamb " got into a discussion 
as to whether Holbein's colouring was as good 
as that of Vandyke? Hazlitt denied it. Lamb 
asserted the contrary; till at length they both 
became so irritated they upset the card-table 
and seized each other by the throat. In the 
struggle that ensued Hazlitt got a black eye; 
but, when the two combatants were parted, Haz- 
litt turned to Talfourd, who was offering his 
aid, and said: 'You need not trouble yourself, 
sir. I do not mind a blow, sir; nothing affects 
me but an abstract idea/ '* * 

That is a very perfect illustration of the Bo- 
hemian's attitude towards reverses of fortune 

* B. R. Haydon's ** Correspondence." 



288 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

that are not concerned with the progress of his 
art. A picture ill painted, a stodgy article (oh, 
the torments of forcing life into a leaden piece 
of prose!), these will upset him, make him mis- 
erable, dejected, at war with all the world. But 
penury; why, that is but a little price to pay for 
freedom; and squalor may be easily tolerated 
for the sake of an escape from convention. 

And, now, to speak of the farewell to Bo- 
hemia; for the young man grows older, and 
perhaps earns money, and takes upon himself 
responsibilities to another goddess than the 
white Venus of the arts. It is a long time since 
" The Lady Anne of Bretaigne, espying Chartier 
the King's Secretary and a famous poet, leaning 
upon his elbows at a table end fast asleepe, shee 
stooping downe, and openly kissing him, said, 
We must honour with our kisse the mouth from 
whence so many sweete verses and golden poems 
have proceeded'';^ but women have still a 
fondness for poets and painters, and, not too 
critical of the value of the vesses and pictures, 
are even willing to marry their authors, money- 
less, untidy wretches as they are. But no sooner 
have they married than they begin to tame them. 
Even the maddest cigarette-smoking art student, 
when she has married her painter, takes him 
away from Bohemia, which is, as perhaps she 
knows without thinking of it, not the place for 

* Peacham's " Compleat Gentleman." 



CONCLUSION 289 

bringing up a family. The woman is always 
for stability and order; a precarious, haphaz- 
ard, irregular, unhealthy existence has none of 
the compensations for her that it holds out to 
her husband. Not that she does not think of 
him, too; but she prefers to see him healthy 
than a genius. Anyhow, the door into the reg- 
istrar's office is the door out of Bohemia. Things 
are never quite the same again. Witness Lamb, 
writing to Coleridge : " I shall half wish you 
unmarried (don't show this to Mrs. C.) for one 
evening only, to have the pleasure of smoking 
with you and drinking egg-hot in some little 
smoky room in a pothouse, for I know not yet 
how I shall like you in a decent room and look- 
ing quite happy." 

And then, too, whether she means it or not, 
the wife alters the man's view of the goal at 
the end of the journey. She is always on the 
side of the recognised success. The artist, how- 
ever unruly, finds himself once a week wearing 
a frock-coat at an " at home " given by his wife 
to '^ useful people." He soon discovers that he 
must exhibit in the usual places, if only to please 
his lady. He makes fewer experiments, but set- 
tles down to adapt his technique to subjects that 
are likely to tell. He works harder, or at least 
more consistently, and has less time for other 
people's studios. He learns that he is not a 
god after all, but only a workingman. The 



290 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

rebellious dreams of his youth die in his breast, 
and he ends a Royal Academician. 

The writer, when he marries, learns that he 
must no longer trust to earning a living by acci- 
dent, while he does his favourite work. There 
are two ways open to him: he may do an im- 
mense amount of criticism and journalism, and 
keep his originality for what leisure he can 
find, or he may make his best work the easiest 
to sell. To keep up his prestige at home he must 
become a popular author. 

The worst of it is that in becoming a success 
you lose the sympathy of the friends you have 
left in Bohemia, and find that for them you are 
even as one of the abhorred Philistines, tolerated 
for old sake's sake, but no longer one of the 
fighting band. 

On the other hand, if the young man does 
not marry, he finds as he grows up that he is 
less and less of a Bohemian. His individuality 
no longer needs for its emphasis expression in 
externals. His taste in talk becomes less catho- 
lic — he is bored by the extravagant young fools 
who are ready to say anything about everything 
they know nothing about. He is annoyed at 
last, unless he is so philosophic as to be amused, 
by the little people with their great pretences, 
their dignities without pedestals; and he finds, 
as he becomes less able to give them the homage 
they require, that they become annoyed with 



CONCLUSION 291 

him, and can do very well without him, having 
new sets of young admirers of their own. 

A novel, a book of poems, or a picture wins 
him some real recognition — and with it, per- 
haps, a rise in income. His relations, who have 
for so long neglected him as a black and errant 
sheep, discover a pride in him, and want to in- 
troduce him to their friends. He is compelled, 
as it were by circumstances alone, to wear better 
clothes, and to take what he is told is his place 
in society. With better clothes comes a snob- 
bish, but pardonable, dislike of being seen with 
the carelessly dressed. He moves to more con- 
venient rooms, has a napkin on his breakfast 
table, and is waked in the morning by a maid 
with hot water, instead of by an alarm clock. 
Who knows? — he may even rent a cottage in the 
country. A thousand things combine to take 
him out of Bohemia. 

And it is better so. There are few sadder 
sights than an old man without any manners 
aping the boyishness of his youth without the 
excuse of its ideals, going from tavern to tavern 
with the young, talking rubbish till two in the 
morning, painfully keeping pace with a frivolity 
in which he has no part. Caliban playing the 
Ariel — it is too pitiful to be amusing. There 
are men who live out all their lives in Bohemia 
(to paraphrase Santayana's definition of fanati- 
cism), ^'redoubling their extravagances when 



292 BOHEMIA IN LONDON 

they have forgotten their aim." I am reminded 
again of my friend's saying, that of all bondages 
vagabondage is the one from which it is most 
difficult to escape. If a man stays in it too long, 
if he allows its garlands to become fetters, its 
vagaries to lose their freshness and petrify into 
habits, he can never get away. When I think 
of the deathbed of one of these old men — of 
the moment when he knows of a sudden that his 
life is gone from him, and that after all he has 
done nothing — I quicken my resolve to escape 
when my time comes, and not to linger till it is 
too late. 

But now, in youth, it is the best life there is, 
the most joyously, honestly youthful. It will 
be something to remember, when I am become 
a respectable British citizen, paying income tax 
and sitting on the Local Government Board, 
that once upon a time in my motley " I have 
flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng." 
It will make a staid middle age more pleasant 
in its ordered ease to think of other days when a 
girl with blue sleeves rolled to her elbows 
cooked me a dinner from kindness of heart, 
because she knew that otherwise I should have 
gone without it; when no day was like the 
last, when a sovereign seemed a fortune, when 
all my friends were gods, and life itself a starry 
masquerade. My life will be the happier, turn 
out what it may, for these friendships, these pot- 



CONCLUSION 293 

house nights, these evenings in the firelight of 
a studio, and these walks, two or three of us 
together talking from our hearts, along the Em- 
bankment in the Chelsea evening, with the lamps 
sparkling above us in the leaves of the trees, the 
river moving with the sweet noise of waters, 
the wings of youth on our feet, and all the world 
before us. 



THE END 



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